Minor Moves: Patterns in Affiliate Relocation

Some minor-league teams are much closer to their parent clubs than others.

On a recent baseball trip that I recounted in these pages, the first stop for my friend and me was a game hosted by the Akron RubberDucks, the Double-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians. This puts the team’s park less than an hour’s drive from the home of its parent organization, a fact the itinerary for our next day’s travels made abundantly clear.

This trivial fact led to a bit of discussion, as will happen on long drives. Not only was Cleveland’s Double-A affiliate close to Progressive Field, but so was its Triple-A club, the Columbus Clippers. My friend and I having been longtime residents of northern New Jersey and longtime Yankees fans, we knew the Clippers had for many years been the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate.* That distinction now rests with the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, a team much closer to the Bronx.

* Indeed, I had been convinced the Columbus team was named the Clippers in honor of Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper. This isn’t true. The team was given its name in 1977, when it was a Pittsburgh affiliate, two years before switching to New York. The appropriateness of the name was happenstance.

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So we had two high-minors teams conveniently close to their parent in Ohio, plus another affiliate that moved from a city several hundred miles distant to a location within two hours’ drive. (More if it’s a game day. Trust us on this one.) This struck me as the start of a pattern. I began to wonder: Have major-league teams been moving their high-minors affiliates closer in recent years?

Why would they do this? My theory: for less lag time between calling up a player from the minors and having him with the team, available to play. Granted, this advantage functions only about half the time, when the team is at home, but for that half of the time, a closer affiliate can make the difference between a full roster and playing a man down.

This was always a concern on some level. Aptly enough, Columbus figured heavily in this during the 1980s. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had a strong penchant for punitively demoting players for short-term bad performances (as short as one game). The rapid turnover of players being sent down–and their replacements being called up–became known in New York-area news media as “The Columbus Shuttle.”

Why speediness of call-ups would become a greater concern only relatively recently is because of modern usage of the pitching staff, especially the bullpen. More pitchers are used with greater attention to fatigue and turnover. Triple-A teams have become a strategic pitcher reserve, with fresh replacement arms sent up as tired or struggling pitchers are sent down (largely relievers, but some back-end starters as well).

There are other reasons to pull high affiliates closer, one being to have them in an area populated with fans of the parent club, boosting fan interest in the farm teams. (“See tomorrow’s stars of your favorite team, today!”) This, however, could apply to all levels, while the promotion argument is limited to the top two tiers, and much more to Triple-A than Double-A. That is the theory, along with some other notions, I will examine.

Settling Down

For my data set, I compiled locations for all Triple-A and Double-A farm teams for all major league clubs from 1968 to 2017. I then used an online distance calculator to find the direct distances between the affiliate and parent cities. Driving distances might have been more practically informative for those within a few hundred miles but would have become misleading at greater distances. I also noted those that required crossing of the Canadian-American border, since this would impose some delay in transit.

Before looking at how near to their parent franchises they move, I’ll lay some groundwork by examining how often high-minors affiliates relocate. The short answer to this question is “less.”

In the first dozen years of my sample, 1968 to 1979, there wasn’t a single year in which either Triple-A or Double-A had no affiliate shifts. There were four years apiece when at least a quarter of affiliates moved from one city to another. In the final dozen years of the sample, 2005 to 2016, there were four years apiece with no shifts and just one instance when more than a quarter of affiliates moved (2008-09 Triple-A). The following graphs show the changes over time. Years given are those leading into the shifts.

Triple-A Moves Double-A Moves

For each graph, the (dotted) trendline drops from over 20 percent at the start to fewer than five percent at the end. High-minor affiliate locations have grown much more stable in recent decades.

Why should this have happened? Several possible answers suggest themselves. Parent clubs may have decided frequent affiliate flipping erodes fan support in the minors. Perhaps there are fewer opportunities to get a better deal in a new city, with expansion not only “promoting” several prime locations but expanding the number of farm clubs at each level. It also could be connected to the general decline of the minors over the years. It may well be a combination of these factors.

Higher affiliate stability might also be a characteristic peculiar to the upper minors, with lower-level teams shifting more often. To test this, I took a census of the movements of Advanced-A affiliates to compare with the higher levels. Since the Advanced-A level was established only in 1990, this narrowed my high-minors sample. Also, the Advanced-A level was unsettled for several years, some major league teams having two affiliates at that level, others having none. (Oakland had two Advanced-A teams, and Houston none, as late as 2002.) I will count the addition or subtraction of an affiliate separately from the moving of one.

From 1990 to 2016, there were 63 affiliate shifts in 818 Triple-A team-years, for a rate of 7.7 percent. In Double-A, it was 66 shifts in 814 team-years,* for an 8.1 percent rate. In Advanced-A, there were 74 shifts among 818 team-years, putting its rate at 9.0 percent. If one includes the additions and subtractions of affiliates, that moves to 89 shifts and a 10.9 percent rate.

* The difference of four comes from the 1990s expansion teams foregoing a Double-A affiliate for the first year of their existences.

A rise of 1.3 percentage points from Triple-A to Advanced-A is not conclusive with samples of that moderate size, but it is, as I like to say, suggestive. The theory that the upper minors have greater affiliate stability is plausible but not proven.

I gave thought to looking at whether stability in the high minors correlated with success of the parent club, but my impression is that there’s far too much noise in the data to tease anything out. That doesn’t mean I mind looking at some anecdotal stuff.

The team with the most volatile high minors over the last 50 years is Cleveland. Its Triple-A city has changed 13 times in the last half-century, and the Double-A city 12 times. That volatility, though, is concentrated in the first 20-plus years. From 1990 on, Cleveland’s high-minors teams have moved just four times, a little below league average. Whether it’s a coincidence that Cleveland was a tail-ender in the decades before 1990 and more often a powerhouse since then, you may judge for yourself.

Other volatile teams in the upper minors have been Pittsburgh (nine Triple-A/10 Double-A changes since ’68), the White Sox (12/6), Milwaukee (11/7), and Oakland (10/7). It’s notable that Triple-A moves hold a 55-42 edge over Double-A among these most volatile teams, when in total the numbers are virtually equal. It suggests, without really proving, that volatile teams flail even worse with the level closest to the majors.

There’s no clear leader for the least volatile team. Four clubs have had just four moves in their high minors since 1968: Arizona, Atlanta, Kansas City,* and Toronto. Tampa Bay stands at one, but the Rays have existed only since 1998–as have the Diamondbacks. Two teams in baseball have never changed their Triple-A affiliates. Kansas City has had the Omaha Royals/Storm Chasers since 1969, and Tampa Bay has had the Durham Bulls since 1998. The longevity record for Double-A belongs to Philadelphia, which has had the Reading Phillies all the way back to 1967.

* Kansas City and its Triple-A affiliate began play in 1969; its Double-A team started up in 1971.

Gathering ‘Round

Having given plenty of tangential facts, I return to my original question: Have high affiliates moved closer to their parent clubs? The quick answer is they have. The more involved answer is that a strong nearing trend began in the mid-1980s but has stopped and even reversed itself during this decade.

The chart below shows the average distance for Triple-A and Double-A affiliates from their parent clubs during the 1968-2017 period. Be aware of the factor of expansions that may shift the numbers: those of 1968 (with four teams entering), 1977, 1993 and 1998 (all with two apiece).

Going into the 1980s, there’s no pattern. Both levels make a clear downward turn in the mid-to-late 1980s, one that generally continues until the mid-2010s. Triple-A then had an upward spike between 2014 and 2015, due to affiliate moves by the Astros (1,073 miles more distant), Dodgers (514 miles), and A’s (1,884 miles).

This isn’t quite the pattern I would have predicted. The current age of bullpen usage probably can be said to begin with Tony LaRussa’s Oakland A’s, notably when he made Dennis Eckersley into the first great one-inning closer. Yet the “come home” movement got underway before that time, and definitely before LaRussa’s methods would have filtered through to the rest of the league.

Digression: Earlier, I mentioned making special note of when a farm team played in a different country from its parent. This would cause player movement to take longer than an intra-national move of equal distance due to delay at the land border or at customs in the airport. This delay has lengthened in recent years due to post-9/11 security concerns,* so I thought there might be an added impetus to shift affiliates to a team’s home country if it wanted to avoid delays in a called-up player reaching the club.

* Since June of 2009, a passport or equivalent document has been necessary for Americans to enter Canada, which was not previously the case.

This turns out not to be so, or at least not clearly so. Major league teams have had fewer cross-border affiliates in the high minors in recent decades, but the trend plainly predates 9/11. The practice peaked in 1989-1992 and by 2008 had declined by three-quarters.

A surge in cross-border affiliation began in the late 1970s, soon after Toronto’s entry into the majors, which was only partly due to the Blue Jays having their higher farm clubs in the USA. Today, the only cross-border affiliates are those of the Blue Jays. Toronto has never had its Triple-A or Double-A affiliate in Canada. The Montreal Expos did, for a dozen years in Triple-A and seven years in Double-A.

The retreat from cross-border affiliates can plausibly be linked to the general trend of bringing high-minors teams closer to the parent club. It trails the main trend by somewhere between five and 10 years, which might be how long it took for front offices to think of this as a way to shorten travel times further. I definitely will not, though, claim it as the lone or necessarily the prime reason for bringing the farm clubs “home.” A definite “maybe” is the best I can do.

I did consider trying to calculate a mileage adjustment for border crossings. The fairly close tracking of cross-border affiliates with overall distance, however, made this somewhat redundant. The mileage numbers serve well as they stand. Thus, my digression ends.

For a different angle on the numbers, I counted up affiliates within ranges of distances from their parent clubs. My four groups were 250 miles or closer, between 250 and 500 miles, between 500 and 1,000, and farther than 1,000. Numbers are given as percentages, to avoid distortion from expansion. Darker colors denote closer affiliates.

Triple-A Distance Ranges Double-A Distance Ranges

Over the full half-century period, the preference for closer affiliates obviously has grown. Again, we see the shift hit a peak a decade or so ago. Since then, teams have backed away modestly from having close affiliates, especially at Triple-A, the movement slowed by the aforementioned trend of greater affiliate stability.

What explains this pattern that took me by surprise? Possibly the explanation is random chance, fluctuations from a baseline reached sometime around the turn of the millennium. Alternatively, it could be intentional. Major league teams may be deciding that bringing their affiliates close doesn’t confer that much of an advantage and may even produce disadvantages.

Recall that the three teams to move their Triple-A affiliates substantially farther away for the 2015 season were the A’s, Astros and Dodgers. These three teams are considered to be in the upper ranks of analytical ballclubs. If all three at the same time decide moving their top minor-league team hundreds or thousands of miles farther from the parent club isn’t a big problem, that’s pretty fair evidence it isn’t a big problem.

As for what disadvantages those teams may see in keeping their high-minors affiliates close, I have little to suggest. Perhaps instead of buttressing the surrounding fan base for the parent clubs, the farm teams cannibalize it, diverting eyeballs and dollars from majors to minors. Major league teams are generally not focused on how their affiliates fare financially, but they certainly care about their own bottom lines. It’s a possibility.

Whatever benefit a more distant affiliate would provide, it would have to outweigh the benefits of keeping it close by, along with the costs of uprooting and replanting the affiliate. This implies those three teams didn’t think quicker call-ups from the minors were a significant benefit after all.

It could be that baseball in general saw an inefficiency to be corrected in distant affiliates starting a few decades ago but more recent analysis is beginning to reverse that conclusion. Or it’s the random chance I suggested earlier. The next few years of moves in the high minors could provide stronger evidence one way or the other.

Summation

There have been two primary trends in high-minors affiliate locations over the last 50 years. First, affiliates have been relocating much less frequently, a trend that may be bottoming out just because there isn’t much lower it can go. Second, the affiliates started moving much closer to their parent clubs’ cities a few decades ago, along with there being far fewer on the other side of the Canadian-American border. This trend, though, has halted and may be in the process of reversing.

My original hypothesis, that the movements closer to parent clubs are due to a desire to shorten travel time for called-up players, especially pitchers, is only indifferently supported. The movement trend began some years before modern usage (or over-usage) patterns in the bullpens arose and could be reversing even though the heavy pressure on those bullpens is, if anything, still increasing.

It may be that George Steinbrenner’s “Columbus Shuttle” was more the bellwether for close farm clubs and quick transfer times than Tony LaRussa’s bullpen machinations. LaRussa and his brethren can only be glad Steinbrenner’s manager firing habits didn’t receive the same emulation.

References and Resources


A writer for The Hardball Times, Shane has been writing about baseball and science fiction since 1997. His stories have been translated into French, Russian and Japanese, and he was nominated for the 2002 Hugo Award.