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.
It took forever because MLB and college baseball were at odds with each other. I remember growing up and hearing from MLB people about how college baseball was glorified high school baseball and you went there to hurt your arm. This was the 80's-90's. It changed as you saw more and more college guys getting into pro baseball some and vice versa plus MLB saw that they were getting most of their players from college and that those players had a higher chance of success at least among American born players.

Quote Originally Posted by Commercecomet24 View Post
I always wondered that myself. Heck back in my day there were over 60 rounds of draft picks and a gazillion MiLB teams. You had all these guys in MiLB making $500 a month and then realizing after a year or two they weren't ever gonna make it and bailing out to try and start a career. It always seemed like kinda of a waste of resources and so many of those players were HS kids and many never went on to college and wound up scraping by for the rest of their lives. There's only so many Mike Piazza stories out there.
Yeah. The days of the "the Astros are going to pay me 2 million dollars and pay for my college even though I got drafted in the 40th round" are over.

Quote Originally Posted by StarkVegasSteve View Post
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.
The issue MLB has there are the private academies some of whom are basically pimping players out.