Angels invite Dust Devils to join franchise. How that could change Tri-Cities baseball

The Tri-City Dust Devils got an invitation this week from the Los Angeles Angels, asking team officials if they would be interested in having their Northwest League organization become an affiliated team of the Angels.

The agreement between the Dust Devils and the Angels would be for 10 years.

Brent Miles, the team president and co-owner of the Dust Devils, said they didn’t have much time to find out who the invitation would come from.

“Maybe 24 hours,” he said. “We read the tea leaves. We kind of put together our bracket as to how everything would fall together. It’s just a big puzzle, involving 120 teams.”

Major League Baseball has refined and remodeled what Minor League Baseball will look like beginning in 2021.

When the Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) between MLB and the minor leagues expired on Sept. 30 of this year, both parties continued to negotiate as to what the new system would look like.

This most recent PBA that expired had been good for 20 years, even though COVID-19 had canceled all of minor league baseball this year.

MLB wanted to cut costs, and that meant paring the teams in minor league baseball around the country from 160 to 120.

At one point last winter, the Dust Devils were on a New York Times list of the 40 teams looking at being cut.

Things didn’t help when the coronavirus canceled all of minor league baseball and all but two months of the MLB’s regular season in 2020.

“It was certainly a unique situation with the PDL (Professional Development License) and COVID happening at the same time,” he said.

Miles had said during the summer that chances were looking better in Tri-City getting another affiliation. But either way, “there would be Dust Devils baseball is some form next summer.”

Miles said he and his staff did everything they could to get their story out to who needed to hear it.

They told it to their MLB partners, all of the MLB teams they’ve worked with, and the minor league baseball negotiating team.

“We thought it was a good story,” Miles said. “Tri-Cities makes sense.”

Dust Devils ownership has not yet seen the PDL agreement that the Angels are going to send the team, and what is in it.

“We should see the full agreement in the next few weeks,” he said. “Then we should have 30 days to sign it.”

Baseball America magazine said earlier this week that it wasn’t a cinch that every minor-league team would sign the agreement. It depends on what is in the contract.

Rumors of such things as a players-only lounge, or indoor batting cages, might be required of minor league teams.

“From our perspective, we’ve go to go through our due diligence,” said Miles. “But we certainly have every expectation of signing it.”

Changes in 2021

If Miles and his partners agree to it, Tri-City fans will see some changes for the 2021 Northwest League season.

For starters, it won’t be a short-season pro league anymore.

For years, the Northwest League had been one of four short-season leagues — the others being the New York-Penn League, the Pioneer League, and the Appalachian League — where the season begins in mid-June and ends around Labor Day weekend.

In 2021, the Northwest League will actually begin play in early April, and teams will play 132 games, compared to the 76 contests NWL teams have been playing annually.

That means the Dust Devils would have 66 home games in 2021.

The Northwest League will also be considered a High-A League, which will mean better talent to see.

Each MLB team will have four minor-league teams — a move to cut organizational costs — and will include squads in Triple-A, Double-A, High-A and at the Low-A level.

There will only be six teams in the Northwest League next year, which means those teams will see a lot of each other.

The other teams making the cut with invitations are the Eugene Emeralds (with the San Francisco Giants), the Everett AquaSox (with the Seattle Mariners), the Hillsboro Hops (with the Arizona Diamondbacks), the Spokane Indians (with the Colorado Rockies), and the Vancouver Canadians (with the Toronto Blue Jays).

“Quite frankly, we thought the Northwest League should stay an eight-team league,” Miles said. “So in that aspect, we’re disappointed.”

The NWL’s two teams on the outside looking in are the Boise Hawks and the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes, as neither team got an MLB invitation.

By early Wednesday afternoon, the Hawks organization — affiliated with Colorado — announced it was joining the Pioneer League, in which its teams lose their MLB affiliation beginning in 2021 and become independent, but an MLB Partner League.

MLB will initially fund the Pioneer League’s operating expenses, provide scouting technology to all eight ballparks and create a procedure for player transfers to MLB organizations.

Boise Hawks president Jeff Eiseman told Boise media Wednesday that the Hawks stadium was a key reason they didn’t get an affiliation invitation.

“We were told our current facility ultimately led to the decision,” Eiseman said. “As we have stated since the day we purchased the Hawks, the venue is a challenge.”

Meanwhile, Salem-Keizer is left on an island.

But it could possibly join up with the West Coast League, the college summer league with 15 teams in the Northwest — including the Walla Walla Sweets and the Yakima Valley Pippens.

If the Dust Devils decided not to sign the PDL with the Angels, they could also possibly join the West Coast League.

If Tri-Cities signs the PDL agreement, it will be the second time in history a Tri-City organization would be an affiliate of the Angels.

In 1962-64, Tri-Cities was an Angels affiliate in the Northwest League.

Either way, minor league baseball should be ready to go in the Tri-Cities next year.

This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 12:39 PM.