Mr. Ed
Posts: 88732
Joined: 7/14/2007
From: Minne-so-ta
Status: offline
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Why some minor league teams have not accepted invites yet. MLB sent a 56-page document to the teams it wants to partner with, outlining the substantive terms of what is to be in the actual 10-year contract, called a Professional Development License, or PDL. Teams have until Dec. 18 to decide whether they’d like to advance to the next step, which is a review of the actual PDL. To move forward, MLB requires minor league owners to sign two things in the next week and a half: a non-disclosure agreement and an indemnification of MLB. To emphasize: Minor league owners at this point are not formally agreeing to be MLB’s partner. That comes once the actual PDL is reviewed. So the decision those teams face now, then, seems simple: if they’re considering a lawsuit against MLB, they’d be signing away those rights in order to review the full PDL. To be clear — MLB is requiring potential MiLB partners to indemnify the league and agree to not disclose anything about the partnership as a prerequisite to even receiving the partnership agreement. Now, I am not a lawyer, but I talked to a couple of friends who are and what this basically means is that MiLB teams will lose their ability to disclose information about the partnership or challenge elements of it legally as a prerequisite to seeing the agreement. The strong impression according to Drellich’s reporting was that failure to agree to either the NDA or indemnification of MLB would lead MLB to move on to offer that partnership to another team that just lost its MLB affiliation, as you can see here: The commissioner’s office expected some of those reactions. Whether anything comes of that disappointment is the biggest question, and there’s not a lot of time for minor league owners to organize — which might be their only chance to achieve any change, if they choose to pursue it. MLB has not signaled a willingness to make individual adjustments to the teams. The commissioner’s office feels that holding talks with that many teams would be impractical, and believes there was plenty of time for teams to make their voices heard previously. If a team wants to turn down the offer, then, MLB will just move down its list, a person with knowledge of league thinking said. Whether that’s a hard-and-fast policy, however, might now be tested.
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