Major League Baseball has made a proposal to dramatically downsize and restructure the minor leagues when the current Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) expires at the end of the 2020 baseball season. The plan would eliminate MLB-affiliated baseball from 42 cities, move the Rule 4 amateur player draft to July while reducing the draft from 40 to 20 rounds, and restructure the leagues to be more geographically compact.
While the plan requires agreement between minor league baseball (MiLB) and Major League Baseball (MLB), some details of the plan have been made public.
Baseball America reported that MLB had submitted a proposal to cut the minor leagues from its current number of 160 major league affiliated teams down to 120, and reduce the number of minor league players down to 150 to 200 players per MLB club.