Partnership with MLB good for Goldeyes, fans

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This article was published 28/09/2020 (1866 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Don’t expect to see the next Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Bo Bichette at Shaw Park any time soon, but the American Association’s new partnership with Major League Baseball should have local baseball fans intrigued.

It was announced last week that the American Association, as well as the Frontier League, are now MLB partner leagues. The AA will stick to its independent roots, but the leagues will work together to grow the sport of baseball and make scouting easier on major league ball clubs.

When Joshua Schaub was hired as the AA’s commissioner in spring 2019, he made it clear his goal was to build a better relationship with the big leagues. He went to the 2019 MLB All-Star Game in Cleveland and created a detailed presentation about the AA for Morgan Sword, the MLB’s executive vice-president of baseball economics and operations, to get the ball rolling on a partnership.

“It finally started to dawn on them that they’ve never fully embraced the independent leagues for some reason,” Schaub told the Free Press.

“There’s a lot of opportunities there to help grow the game. We draw in attendance of 1.8 million people per season, which outdraws nine major league teams individually. They saw an opportunity to use the American Association to market the game. We saw a partnership with them as an opportunity to get some resources they have spread across our league from a technology and marketing perspective to help us grow individually within our market. I thought it was a win-win situation.”

The agreement will see the MLB use AA ballparks such as Shaw Park, the home of the Winnipeg Goldeyes, for youth programming. It also means the Goldeyes will form a friendship with the lone Canadian team in the majors.

“One opportunity we have is each of our member clubs will have cross-marketing with a major league team. For Winnipeg, it’ll be the Toronto Blue Jays, whereby there are ticket bundles packaged together to see Goldeyes games as well as the Blue Jays,” explained Schaub, before adding that the AA may also receive some coverage on the MLB Network moving forward.

“You’re going to see content up on the Winnipeg Goldeyes videoboard regarding the Blue Jays and it will be the same for the Blue Jays content in their marketing to go follow the Winnipeg Goldeyes and watch them. You’ll probably see concourse signage, cross-marketing between both properties. Truthfully, we still have a long way to go to define what this is going to look like but that is the opportunity in front of us.”

The biggest winners might just be the players. Through the MLB’s partnership, ballparks such as Shaw Park will be provided industry-leading cameras and radars to better track pitches and batted balls at the independent level. Schaub said without that data, teams such as the New York Yankees won’t look at players.

Now that the AA is caught up in the technology game, it should lead to more opportunities for players to make the jump to the next level. All the data will be sent to the MLB commissioner’s office and made available to all 30 teams.

“What we found in meeting with MLB teams is they’d probably provide more opportunities for independent league players if technology and data capture was available… Through MLB’s partnership, we’d put that technology into our stadiums so we can capture that same data as they do for their own minor leaguers and their major league players, therefore, it will allow MLB teams to compare apples to apples on a data perspective for players,” Schaub said.

For Schaub, it was important to make a deal that didn’t give up any control over the league. The MLB has used the Atlantic League, another independent league they’re partners with, to experiment with several possible rule changes such as larger bases, limiting defensive shifts and mound visits, and an automated ball-strike system to call pitches. That won’t be the case in the AA, as teams will remain free to play by the league’s rules.

There are more layers to the agreement, but that’s all Schaub can reveal for now. Once the MLB season is over, the two sides will resume communications and build upon the framework they have in place.

“There’s a lot more to it, including, potentially, and this is a teaser, we have post-season play against other partner leagues — the Atlantic League and Frontier League — so we could have an American Association champion and a partner league champion moving forward. But those details are yet to be worked out.”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31