Cover Essay · Sports
The Untapped Economics of Minor League Broadcasting
The FAST-era distribution stack has quietly inverted the unit economics of minor league broadcasting — most of the teams we already cut were already in the black, and nobody had the measurement layer to notice.
In 2020, Minor League Baseball was restructured. Roughly forty affiliated teams lost their affiliation as MLB cut from 160 farm clubs to 120 Professional Development League licensees. Cities that had fielded a professional baseball team for generations — in some cases for more than a century — were told that the math no longer worked. The teams were either absorbed into independent leagues, re-classified into smaller summer-collegiate outfits, or simply disappeared.