Photo by Alex Trautwig/MLB Photos via Getty Images
New York Daily News | Bill Madden: While the plan for now seems to be a standard 162-game 2021 season, deep rifts between MLB’s owners and players have only festered throughout the winter. The most recent development has been a lack of concern, in the players’ eyes, for health and safety protocols as the league prepares for a second year of baseball in a pandemic. As the U.S. grieves another 3,500 deaths from COVID-19 on Saturday, the Players Association is bringing forth criticism of any plan of action for keeping on-field talent safe and healthy. This is but one more grievance between the two sides ahead of the CBA expiration in December that could put 2022 in jeopardy.
How Somerset Patriots became Yankees’ Double-A affiliate | Q & A with owner Steve Kalafer
Updated Feb 06, 2021;
Posted Feb 06, 2021
Steve Kalafer’s Somerset Patriots are the new Double-A farm club of the Yankees after being a big draw at TD Bank Ballpark for more than two decades as a founding member of the independent Atlantic League.Somerset Patriots
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Minor league baseball is scheduled to begin in early May, and it’s a long time coming because the entire 2020 season was a pandemic casualty. On opening day for the Somerset Patriots, the Yankees’ new Double-A Eastern League affiliate, owner and founder Steve Kalafer will be thinking about his late father. Milton Kalafer, 83 years young when he passed on the Fourth of July 1999, was a Newark Bears bat boy as a kid, a World War II vet and machine-shop owner as an adult, and a Yankees fan for life.
NJBIZ Conversations: Steve Kalafer December 14, 2020
7:18 am
Like nearly everything else, baseball was strange this year. The major leagues managed to get through a shortened season and crown a champion, but minor league baseball was shut down. Around these parts, however, the minor league off-season has been … noteworthy. The big story was the move by the New York Yankees to shift its Double A minor league affiliate from the Trenton Thunder to the Somerset Patriots. The Bridgewater-based Patriots are run by Steve Kalafer, who is also chairman of the Flemington Car and Truck Country auto dealerships. He’s also a lifelong Yankees fan. In the latest edition of NJBIZ Conversations, Editor Jeff Kanige spoke with Kalafer about how the team survived through the summer, the outlook for next season and what the new affiliation will mean for the Patriots and the region’s economy. “We are the hallmark of Somerset County,” he said. “We are in the epicenter of Bridgewater. This