For those who follow big-league baseball — for those, say from the Tigers' cosmos — this is not the kind of news that stacks up with hiring AJ Hinch as manager.
But within baseball's nursery, the minor leagues, there is drama bubbling. Or, perhaps, the more accurate word is anxiety.
Major League Baseball is pretty much preparing to take over the minor leagues and cut direct-license deals with 120 teams heading into the Mystery Year of 2021.
Several storylines can be gleaned from what is known and what, more often, is being whispered.
— Note that those proposed 120 minor-league teams are 42 fewer teams than the 162 clubs that have been on the modern minor-league books. MLB isn't disputing that 40-plus minor-league towns are about to lose their teams, or that many of those clubs will be absorbed into Independent League frameworks that will run outside MLB's direct oversight.
— What this means for the Tigers, for now, is that they're saying goodbye to their old short-season Low-A affiliate at Norwich, Connecticut. The Connecticut Tigers — they last year were creatively renamed the Norwich Sea Unicorns — generally functioned as a June-July-August stopover for talented kids fresh from college or for personnel (often older) that had graduated from Gulf Coast League boot camp. The New York-Penn League is no more. Not as it previously existed. Thus, the Sea Unicorns are expected to be gone from Detroit's baseball portfolio even before they played a single game in those snazzy Sea Unicorn togs.
— The Tigers will be maintaining five teams: Triple-A, Double-A, High-A, Low-A, and a couple of joint squads that will continue — for now — in the Gulf Coast League hatchery at Lakeland, Florida.
The question that hasn't yet been answered is where those above affiliates might be situated.
