Quote Originally Posted by BrunswickDawg View Post
It's interesting to me how long it has taken MLB to realize that they had a huge cost savings opportunity for player development via College Baseball and their Caribbean academies. MiLB will never go away completely - but I think in the next round you will see it parred down to 3 MiLB teams per franchise; a development academy at their Spring training sites; their international academies. As MiLB players have pushed for more money - the reduction in teams became inevitable. College and JUCO will fill that Low-A gap, and fewer and fewer High School guys will be getting drafted.
The international academies was the first break in the dam. They figured out they could get these kids at 16 for pennies on the dollar, lock them up early, and then their first extension is coming at 20 or 21, when most of them have made their ML debut, instead of 26 or 27. That's a 100 million to 150 million dollar savings from the club's perspective.