Content: Triple-A fans looking a new major league affiliate to come to town next season may not want to throw out their old gear just yet.

Chances are it’s not happening.

Even though the affiliation shuffle doesn’t kick into gear until after the season, a lot of the jockeying will take place over the next few months. Minor league franchises cannot negotiate new affiliations until mid-September, but they can renew their current deals at any time. And that is likely what will happen in Triple-A this year.

Just two Triple-A teams changed affiliates after the 2010 season, when Nolan Ryan-owned Round Rock (Pacific Coast) brought in Ryan’s newly purchased Texas Rangers, sending the Astros to PCL neighbor Oklahoma City.

Three of the five longest-tenured affiliations in the minor leagues can be found in Triple-A: Omaha, a Royals affiliate since each debuted in 1969; Pawtucket, a Red Sox team since 1973; and Iowa, with the Cubs since 1981. Nine other Triple-A teams have affiliations that date back until 2000 or earlier. So even though nearly half of Triple-A teams have player-development contracts expiring after this season, expect many of those to be renewed before the season ends.

“I think we’re locked into . . .

Content: Another Opening Day in the independent minor leagues has arrived. We’re about to celebrate two decades of the modern independent movement, and two decades of trying to figure out exactly what to make of indy ball.

One thing for sure is that independent baseball is going through a major consolidation that ultimately is going to leave us with three significant leagues in the long term: the American Association, the Atlantic League and the Frontier League.

All three of these leagues have a proven track record of success, in some cases stretching back to the beginning of the modern era, and the financial strength to remain stable and weather the inevitable bad season or bad market.

What they reflect more than anything else is the maturation of independent baseball as an established subset of professional baseball. For those of us who have been around long enough to see the entire evolution, it’s interesting to see that many of the teams that helped get the whole movement started probably would not find a place in the independent leagues of today.

When independent baseball started up in 1993, with the Frontier and Northern leagues, it was seen as an alternative to the affiliated . . .

Content: Joe Klein and Sparky Lyle remember one of their first meetings with a major league farm director to promote their fledgling Atlantic League. It didn’t go according to plan.

“The guy fell asleep on us,” Klein, the executive director of the league, recalled from that meeting in 1997. “Sparky said, ‘What are we going to do now?’ I put my finger to my mouth and said, ‘Shhh.’

“But I made sure I slammed the door on our way out.”

No one is slamming doors to the Atlantic League now. The eight-team league, with modern ballparks in a fan-friendly environment, is considered a successful model for independent baseball. The league drew more than two million fans last season, and has returned more than 500 players to affiliated organizations, including Rickey Henderson, Ruben Sierra and Jose Canseco, since its inception 15 years ago.

“It has become an easier task for our teams to recruit because players and their representatives understand where MLB teams go looking for players when they are needed,” said Klein, the former general manager of the Rangers, Royals and Tigers.

The league is the brainchild of Frank Boulton, who gave up his 25-year career as a bond trader on . . .

Content: Nov. 22, 2011, will be remembered as a great day in baseball history. On that day Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association announced a five-year renewal of their Collective Bargaining Agreement, assuring baseball of more than 20 years of continuous labor peace.

You might not have known that had you followed the news on Twitter that day, however, as the internet melted down with pundits offering their opinions on how the changes to the draft and international signing process could damage the game.

As noted previously, the long run of peace and both sides’ relative satisfaction with the huge pieces of the agreement—namely the economics of the game—meant the focus could turn to more ancillary issues that in some cases had been neglected for years.

In large part that focus turned to the draft and international markets. MLB wanted to find a way to limit the growth of signing bonuses in both areas, having found its patchwork, unilateral efforts to do so over the years largely ineffective.

At the time the CBA was announced the overall reaction to the changes was that the baseball sky was falling.

I’m not here to say whether the draft changes are going . . .

Content: The Winter Meetings came and went without any sport-rattling developments in the minor leagues.

No franchise relocations. No realignment. No teams folding under the weight of a recession.

And while there are still plenty of developments coming baseball’s way in 2012, closing out a challenging year with a drama-free week in Dallas was certainly worthy of celebration.

Much of minor league baseball’s pressing issues were settled well before the industry gathered at the Hilton Anatole hotel. The highs of 2011 included: Minor League Baseball’s extension of the Professional Baseball Agreement with Major League Baseball, a new five-year collective bargaining agreement with the umpires union, overall attendance dipping just 0.5 percent as average attendance increased nearly 1 percent, and gross revenue going up about 5 percent in 2010 (the most recent year tabulated) with early indications that 2011 will see another increase.

“Our last 12 months have been filled with devastating and record-setting weather events, continuing economic hardship in our communities, high unemployment, socio-economic issues with health care and government intervention, a jittery Wall Street and gridlocked Washington,” Minor League Baseball president Pat O’Conner told an oversized conference room filled with minor league operators during the opening session of the Winter . . .

Content: Building a ballpark in California isn’t impossible, but unearthing the dollars to get digging is going to require some creativity following the state’s Supreme Court ruling just before the New Year.

The court upheld California Gov. Jerry Brown’s earlier decision to abolish redevelopment agencies as part of a 2011 budget compromise, essentially wiping out state funding for local construction projects—like ballparks.

The Padres’ Triple-A Tucson affiliate is the most immediate casualty of the ruling, as its plan to settle in the San Diego suburb of Escondido is now dead. But the decision also affects the California League, which is trying to find new or renovated ballparks for a pair of its clubs.

California League president Charlie Blaney described the court’s ruling as “disappointing but not surprising” and said he remains committed to building new ballparks for the Bakersfield and High Desert franchises within the league’s footprint.

One of the potential destinations, likely for High Desert, had been the city of Chico. Even without state money, Blaney says the city remains a possible destination, as supporters of a ballpark project are considering alternative financing plans to get one built. They may propose a sales tax that would help pay for a . . .

Content: The most amazing thing about sending the Prospect Handbook to press is not how happy we are about it—though to be sure we are very happy—it’s how we always wish that we had more time.

Thanks to the constraints of printing and distribution, the Prospect Handbook must go to the printer right before Christmas, so that it can work its way to you before pitchers and catchers report, and even more important, before your fantasy draft. Were that not so, I have no doubt that we would take another few days, or even weeks with the book. There is always a report to improve, a ranking to tweak—and this year, a Baseball America Grade to argue about.

Baseball America Grades are one of the most significant changes to the book since it debuted in 2001. We make changes to the book every year, from the modest, such as changing the statistical categories we list, to the more significant, such as adding minor league depth charts.

We have long discussed adding a thumbnail view of each prospect in the book, so you could see at a glance how we view a player and so it’s easier to compare players across organizations. . . .

Content: ZEBULON, N.C.—Joe Kremer was talking recently about the shipment of weights and other equipment from Kinston, N.C., to a new home at the Carolina Mudcats’ Five County Stadium.

The longtime Mudcats general manager insisted repeatedly that the Indians moved the equipment in February before realizing that he actually meant November.

“My mind’s moving forward,” Kremer said, apologizing with a chuckle, “not backward.”

The innocuous slip points to what seems to be a mantra now in Zebulon, where a new affiliation and a more sensible league membership have the franchise looking toward to what it hopes will be a bright, profitable future.

The Mudcats, members of the Double-A Southern League for the first 21 years of their existence, will begin an affiliation with the Indians in the high Class A Carolina League in 2012. The franchise moved from nearby Kinston, which had enjoyed an uninterrupted relationship with the Indians since 1987 and now finds itself without a team for the first time since the 1970s.

Kinston businessman Cam McRae sold the Kinston club to Mudcats owner Steve Bryant in December 2010, when Bryant sold Carolina’s spot in the Southern League and its affiliation with the Reds to a group in Pensacola, . . .

Content:

As the first Opening Day in 33 years without a Kinston, N.C., franchise in the Carolina League approaches, another longtime league member may also be on the way out.

The Lynchburg Hillcats, a franchise that been a part of the Carolina League since 1966,
could be moving to Wilmington, N.C., after the team’s owners agreed in principle to sell to the Atlanta Braves. The soonest that the move could take place would be for the 2014 season.

The Braves, who own all of their minor league affiliates except at the high Class A level, want to complete their collection with a team in a new ballpark in Wilmington, as part of a joint
ownership with Mandalay Baseball Properties. The deal is not done, and
Carolina League president John Hopkins said, “There are many more mountains to
climb.”

The biggest mountain is the construction of the new ballpark. The sale
is contingent on the new park being built, and at this point the city of Wilmington doesn’t know where the park would be or how it would be paid for.

The deal also requires the Braves to find a new tenant for the ballpark in Lynchburg, though it could be a . . .

Content: Minor League Baseball severed ties with the Jim Evans Academy for Professional Umpiring following an incident during a company outing in which four instructors impersonated members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The sport will no longer accept graduates from the Evans Academy, which before this year was one of two accredited schools that provided umpires to the sport. Minor League Baseball opened its own training academy, The Umpire School, this year.

The split comes as a result of an incident that took place in late January during the Evans Academy’s annual party at a nearby bowling alley in Kissimmee, Fla. According to a New York Times report, the bowlers at the party split into four colorfully named teams. One group, headed by lead instructor Jason Klein, called themselves “Klein’s Kleaning Krew” and entered the alley with the name silkscreened on their sheets and sheet-covered cones on their head.

The incident was brought to light when the company’s lone black instructor complained to Evans four days after the party and later resigned, the Times reported. Minor League Baseball, which recently has stressed diversity by trying to create ownership and operations opportunities for minorities, conducted an investigation of the incident and decided . . .