Mississippi Braves Become Latest MiLB Team To Announce Plans To Move Cities
Image credit: (Photo by Tom Priddy/Four Seam Images)
The Mississippi Braves announced that the 2024 season will be the team’s last in Pearl, Miss.
After the season, the Braves’ Double-A Southern League affiliate will move to Columbus, Ga. The team will move into a massively renovated stadium at Golden Park, which was once home to a Class A South Atlantic League team and also served as the site of the Olympic softball tournament in 1996.
The release announced the hopes that another professional baseball team could come to Pearl, Miss. But the geographic alignment of partner leagues makes that less likely. There is no professional baseball team in any partner league within 400 miles of Pearl. There are summer amateur college leagues across the Southeast.
The Mississippi Braves’ lease for Trustmark Park ends after the 2024 season. The team moved to Pearl from Greenville, S.C. in 2005.
They are at least the third MiLB team to announce plans to move to new cities in the next two years. The Carolina Mudcats, the Brewers’ Low-A affiliate, signed an agreement to move from Zebulon, N.C. to nearby Wilson, N.C. The Down East Wood Ducks, the Rangers’ High-A affiliate, are planning to move to a new ballpark in Spartanburg, S.C.
The Mississippi Braves and Down East Wood Ducks are owned by Diamond Baseball Holdings, the largest owner of MiLB teams in history. The Milwaukee Brewers own the Carolina Mudcats.
They may not be the last. These moves are happening largely because of the looming facility standards across the minor leagues. As part of MLB’s takeover of the operation of the minors after the canceled 2020 season, facility standards for MiLB stadiums were significantly increased. Most notably, teams had to increase the size of visitor’s clubhouses significantly, upgrade training facilities and add food preparation and dining areas. Teams had to install locker rooms for female staff and they upgraded lighting standards among other requirements.
There was a grace period for teams to bring stadiums up to the new standards. In 2023, teams could have fewer than 30 “points” of violations for areas not meeting the standards. Teams must have fewer than 20 points in 2024. For Opening Day 2025, it’s fewer than 10 points.
To put those numbers in context, any stadium that does not have facilities for female staff with two shower heads, two water closets and lavatories is a 10-point deduction. Failing to have two covered pitching/hitting tunnels is 10 points. There are multiple other standards that are 10-point deductions. Any stadium that has 10 points of deductions in 2025 will be non-compliant.
For some stadiums, the upgrades were relatively inexpensive. In other cases, it will cost millions of dollars to bring old stadiums up to the new standard. And that helps explain why some teams are moving.
This is similar to what happened after the 1990 Professional Baseball Agreement made similar leaps in facility standards. Multiple teams moved to cities willing to build new, compliant stadiums.
It’s still not clear what will happen to teams that are in non-compliant stadiums when the 2025 season begins. Multiple sources indicated that a couple of dozen teams are believed to still lack firm plans for stadium upgrades.
There are indications that teams with funded, firm stadium upgrade plans—even if incomplete by 2025 Opening Day—will be dealt with leniently. It’s much less clear what will happen to teams that have no firm plans to meet the new standards.
Legally, the Professional Development Licenses all 120 teams signed allow MLB to take back the license and grant it to another operator (in another city) if a team is non-compliant.
But with so many teams potentially facing non-compliance, it’s less clear whether MLB can actually follow through with that threat. In some areas of the country, it is unlikely that MLB could find enough new cities and operators to keep leagues at full strength if it takes the PDLs from all non-compliant teams.
