Imagine Open Play

Open Play is a proposal to renew baseball and bring an improved experience for fans, players, and teams. 

Open Play will integrate Major and Minor League Baseball and allow for teams to move between leagues based on their performance. Read how and why Open Play works here. 

Our goal is for Major League Baseball to study Open Play with an eye towards implementation. Please sign the petition below if you agree.

How Open Play Works

Baseball needs something new while retaining the core character of the game. Open Play does just that. 

Open Play will allow for the top two teams of each baseball league to earn promotion to the league above. The bottom two teams of the higher league will move to the lower league to balance it out. 

Open Play will increase player salaries, particularly in the minors; bring new investment into major and minor teams by creating new avenues for advancement; increase fan interest; discourage tanking; and create new and exciting matchups. 

More money, more excitement, and more opportunities lead to a baseball rejuvenation.

While this concept may be new to US sports, it has been used successfully in European soccer for over a century. Baseball is in a unique position to bring it to the US.

Read more below about the benefits, and read our responses to common questions.

Fans are familiar with the mega-contracts awarded to baseball’s superstars. But many Minor League players live on poverty-level wages.

Open Play will create more opportunities for players to advance. Open Play will drive investment into minor league teams from ambitious new owners. There will be greater competition for players, driving up wages. More sponsorship revenue for lower-league teams will also drive wages up.

Data from English soccer, which has an Open Play system, shows steady increases in wages for players in both the top and lower leagues.

A big change like this happened once before in pro sports, when the NFL and the AFL merged in 1966. The new technology that spurred the change was TV---the 1958 NFL championship game drew 45 million viewers. Now the cell phone has created new revenue streams for pro sports, so if baseball played more meaningful games, fan engagement would increase.

We expect many investors will see Open Paly as an opportunity to invest in a minor league team. Some may want to invest in trying to gain promotion to higher leagues. Others may invest in becoming a “feeder” team for higher leagues–buying prospects for cheap, training them, and selling them to teams in higher leagues.

Open Play would also increase the amount of shared money in TV rights and other revenue streams. Promotion playoffs and demotion fights would drive media coverage, fan attendance, and advertising dollars. There would be new sports-betting opportunities from more thoroughly integrated leagues.

As part of Open Play, baseball could create a shared revenue stream–a 31st piece of the pie–that it shares downstream with lower leagues. Open Play will draw more money into baseball, and there are many ideas and opportunities to use that to improve the sport.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

In England, there are seven tiers of soccer leagues, with the Premier League at the top. At the end of each season, the three worst Premier League teams are relegated to the Championship, the second tier. The two top Championship teams are promoted to the Premier League, while the four next highest-placed Championship teams enter a playoff for the final spot. There are similar systems in other major European leagues. Players are contracted to teams and can be bought and sold or (less commonly) swapped.

Baseball has an aging fan base and faces declining fan attendance for many reasons. The NCAA March Madness Tournament was originally only 8 teams. Isn’t it so much more exciting now that it’s opened up to 68?

The league can consider a “parachute” payment to teams that are relegated. This means a relegated team would still receive a slice of the TV revenue from the league they were demoted from. This softens the blow of relegation and promotes competition.

Promoted teams can receive a promotion bonus to allow them to invest in bolstering their roster. A minor league team promoted to the majors doesn’t have to win a pennant its first year–it just has to stay up.

What incentive do owners have to join Open Play and take on a new risk? We believe the value of all teams will appreciate because of the increased overall revenue to baseball. One additional solution is to create a one-time founder’s bonus to compensate current MLB owners for the additional risk.

Additionally, consider how many Americans–including those tied to baseball–are investing in European soccer teams that are already a part of Open Play-like systems. To name a few: Fenway Sports Group owns Liverpool; Billy Beane is invested in Barnsley FC in England; and former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt owns most of French team Olympique de Marseille. In total, Americans own one-fifth of the top soccer teams in the UK, France, and Italy, according to Bloomberg.

There are a lot of details that would need to be worked out for baseball to adopt Open Play. That’s why we are asking MLB to form a study group. Sign the petition here if you haven’t. 




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