Since this blog and the main site are all about “The Cardinal Nation”, I thought this post I ran across the other day would be worthy of a few seconds of your time. A writer from the minor league-focused blog called “Bus Leagues Baseball” calculated the distance in miles from each Major League to their top six affiliates.
Here is the NL Central roll call, listed in order from closest to farthest away in average miles:
Pittsburgh: 374 miles
St. Louis: 546 miles
Cincinnati: 695 miles
Chicago: 943 miles
Houston: 953 miles
Milwaukee: 970 miles
Closest Cardinals affiliate: Springfield Cardinals (AA), 217 miles from St. Louis
Farthest Cardinals affiliate: Palm Beach Cardinals (A+): 1,136 miles from St. Louis
Closest NL Central affiliate: Dayton Dragons (A), just 49 miles from Cincinnati
Farthest NL Central affiliate: Arizona Brewers (Rookie): 1,790 miles from Milwaukee
The details by club with links to other divisions as well can be accessed here.
Jumbo hates to be stickler and would rather focus on what data mean, but the Bus League blogger omitted the Cards affiliate in the Gulf Coast League.
Inclusion of this 7th US affiliate hould raise the average miles for the Cards above 600 miles.
Hey Brian, it doesn’t appear that Jaime Garcia is too far away from making a September contribution. He was dominate in PB today.
Jumbo, in my eyes, the Bus League blogger did an apples to apples comparison by taking the top six clubs in every organization. Not all 30 organizations have the same number of affiliates.
Agree on Garcia. It is early still but he has another month to get ready. Would be a nice Sept add for sure.
The Bus League blogger was gracious to adjust the average for the Cards, owing to Jumbo’s comment. His revised stats are now posted as his blog.
Its a little unclear what the average distance between minor league affiliate and ML team implies. Maybe it does not imply much of anything.
The Pirates are a small spending team and have the shortest average to affiliates. It can take many years to change your affiliates, being contingent on minor league teams wanting to affilate with different ML teams.
One possibly useful metric might be the attendance at a minor league affiliate versus average attendance for this league or level. This would be a surrogate metric for the economic health of the affiliate versus comparable minor league teams.
Another metric would be the number of years of affilation. This indicates stability in the relationship between ML team and minor league location.
The Brewers are a midwest team, but their average distances to affiliates is higher than the Pirates and Cards. I am surprised the Astros are the highest in the division, since they should be able to find towns a bit closer, but you have to do what you have to do.
Another way to think about this is to compare affiliates to minor league home base, which may NOT be the ML team city. The minor league home base for the Cards seems Jupiter, Florida. This is where EST is, and where injured players can go to rehab. But does distance from Jupiter matter? Its hard to know why it does.
I guess the point of the metric the Bus League blogger’s metric is the degree to which affiliates can support the geographic fan base of the ML team. The Cards try to be nearby (Quad Cities, Springfield, Memphis) to the extent possible. Palm Beach. Batavia, Johnson City, and Jupiter are to have teams in leagues without nearby towns. The Pirates are more tightly grouped near their fan epicenter.
[...] by OMDQ in Baseball. Leave a Comment The Cardinal Nation Blog. That’s the name of the blog that linked to one of the “average distance” posts [...]
Another view on minor league clustering from the New York Times.