Quote:
Originally Posted by Spritze
I ran a query last year of all the independent teams and a large number turned out to be de-facto affiliated teams as their rosters were made up largely of players who were on loan from a single MLB franchise in the pre-working agreement days.
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The nature of the relationship between the majors and minors was not a simple one. Commissioner Landis was dead-set against the farm system, and did everything he could to thwart it, but with limited success—the clubs wanted it too much.
The minors were mostly independent; some would take a few players on option from a major league club, while the rest would sell their best talent to higher-level teams (the Baltimore Orioles of the 1920s are perhaps the best example of this; the International League being Rule 5 draft exempt helped). An interesting twist in the working agreements prior to 1932 was that the number of players the major league club could select from the minor league club counted against the major league team's reserve limit, even though they weren't yet chosen by the ML team. This is what limited working agreements. (Outright ownership of a minor league club was another matter; in that case the ML team could sell/buy players to/from its minor league outfit as it wished.)
In December of 1931, due to the effects of the Depression, the working agreement was changed so that the number of players to be selected from the minor league club no longer counted against the ML team's reserve limit until they were actually named. This is what helped affiliations grow, along with minor league teams desperately needing the cash infusion a working agreement promised.