For a lot of small American cities the local minor league team was the only professional sports they had. When MLB reorganized its affiliates those towns did not get a vote.
In September 2020, Major League Baseball announced it was restructuring its player development system. The league reduced the number of affiliated minor league teams from 160 to 120, cutting 40 franchises that had in many cases been operating for decades. The official reason was modernization and better player development. The actual reason was money.
MLB had been looking for ways to reduce development costs for years. The old system, where individual teams subsidized minor league operations through player salaries while the franchises themselves were independently owned and operated, was expensive and logistically complicated. A leaner system with fewer affiliates, closer to major league facilities, was cheaper to run.
So they ran the spreadsheet and 40 towns lost their teams.
If you grew up in a major American city you probably have a hard time understanding what a minor league baseball team means to a small town. But in places like Tri-City, New York, or Burlington, Iowa, or Elizabethton, Tennessee, the local team was the cultural anchor of summer. It was affordable entertainment for families that could not afford to drive three hours to a major league game. It was a place where people knew the players by name because the players ate at the same diners and lived in the same neighborhoods.
It was also, in many cases, the only professional sports franchise those towns had ever had or would ever have.
When MLB made its cuts it treated those franchises as line items in a development budget. The communities that had built stadiums, sold season tickets, and organized youth baseball programs around those teams were not consulted.
Several of the cut cities had built new or renovated stadiums in the years before the contraction using public money, sometimes under agreements that included long-term affiliation commitments. When MLB reorganized, some of those cities were left with expensive publicly funded stadiums and no team to play in them.
The league's position was essentially that its obligation was to develop major league talent, not to serve as a community institution for cities that happened to have hosted that development process for a few decades.
That is a coherent business position. It is also a genuine illustration of how professional sports organizations relate to the communities they operate in when the financial calculus changes. The loyalty runs one direction. When it stops being profitable the team is gone and the town is left holding the stadium debt.
Some of the cut franchises found independent leagues to join. Some folded entirely. A handful of cities managed to attract new affiliated teams when other markets became available. Most are still trying to figure out what comes next.
The players who were developing in those systems lost their jobs too, though that part of the story got considerably less attention than the franchise closures. Forty teams worth of minor leaguers were cut from affiliated ball overnight. Many of them never made it back.
MLB called it streamlining. The towns called it something else.