New Mid-Atlantic League Will Face Awkward Scheduling Dilemmas

In many cases, the answers for how the levels will be structured are obvious or have been made somewhat clear. All of this is dependent on teams accepting their invitations and signing  Professional Development Licenses.

Triple-A is expected to have two leagues, a 20-team league on the East Coast/Midwest and a 10-team West Coast league. The switch of Fresno from Triple-A to low Class A reduces the number of West Coast teams by one, which aligns the number of West/Mountain time zone MLB teams with the number of West/Mountain time zone Triple-A teams. Wichita and San Antonio will move down from Triple-A to Double-A, while Sugar Land and St. Paul are coming over from independent leagues. Jacksonville will move up from Double-A.

At Double-A, not much will change from the old format. The Texas League will add two teams in Wichita and San Antonio. The Southern League will lose two teams—Jacksonville is moving up and Jackson did not receive an invitation. The Eastern League will swap out Somerset from independent baseball for Trenton, but remains at the same number of teams.

Low Class A will see a lot of movement. The California League will move down from high Class A, but remain at eight teams with Fresno expected to replace Lancaster. The Florida State League will move down from high Class A and drop from 10 teams to eight with Charlotte and Florida departing. The South Atlantic League is expected to fill the 12 remaining slots.

The most complicated arrangement will take place in high Class A. The six-team Northwest League will move up from short-season ball to provide West Coast teams an option in high Class A that is closer to home. The Midwest League will drop from 16 teams to 12 with Burlington, Clinton and Kane County dropped from affiliated ball. Bowling Green will move to the Mid-Atlantic League.

The Mid-Atlantic League will fill the other 12 spots, and this is where the problems arise.

Bowling Green is not an ideal geographic fit for the league. It is 270 miles from the nearest other team in the Southern Division of the league and more than 350 miles from some of the other teams in the Southern Division.

The bigger problem is that the league, as currency constructed, has a seven-team Southern Division (Asheville, Bowling Green, Greensboro, Greenville, Hickory, Rome and Winston-Salem) and a five-team Northern Division (Aberdeen, Brooklyn, Hudson Valley, Jersey Shore and Wilmington).

Putting Hudson Valley’s club in Fishkill, N.Y. and the Rome, Ga. club in the same league is never good from a geographical standpoint—Google Maps pegs it as a 918-mile trip from stadium to stadium. But the South Atlantic League has long worked around massive distances like this by putting teams in separate divisions and ensuring that they almost never play each other. Some team in the southern part of the Sally league knew it was likely to have one bad trip to Lakewood, N.J. a year and vice versa.

In a league with seven teams in the south and five in the north, that is no longer an option. Someone from the south is playing someone from the north all the time, which means teams will be required to make a number of long road trips.

Some of those issues can be ameliorated by clever scheduling. A team in the north can travel to one southern division city and then hit two more teams close by before heading home and vice versa. It makes for longer road trips and longer homestands, which is not ideal from a ticket sales perspective when it comes to home games.

Clever scheduling for off days can make sure teams don’t have to fly for those trips over 350 miles. The trips will be long. The travel will be expensive. Many players will spend off days riding buses on Interstates across the East Coast.

And until there is an even number of teams in each division, there is unlikely to be an easy fix.