The names have been known for a while, but MLB made it mostly official: the Yankees will have SWB, Somerset, Hudson Valley, and Tampa as their four full-season affiliates in 2021 and beyond, while the Mets will have Syracuse, Binghamton, Brooklyn, and St. Lucie.
The news comes as all 120 necessary MiLB franchises have been offered invitations to join the new Minor League Baseball structure as of Wednesday, and the affiliations will become official once teams sign Professional Development Licenses.
The Yankees, of course, cut ties with Low-A Charleston and Double-A Trenton, and with the Florida State League reclassifying from High-A to Low-A, the team chose to move their High-A team to Hudson Valley instead of fellow former Short-Season Class-A New York-Penn League member Staten Island.
The Mets, meanwhile, decided to move their new High-A team to Brooklyn with the demise of the NYPL, cutting ties with their former Low-A affiliate in Columbia, South Carolina.
Both teams lost their Appalachian League affiliates (Kingsport Mets and Pulaski Yankees), as well, but the Appalachian League has already announced that it will become a wood-bat collegiate summer league for underclassmen.
Good news for three of the four deposed affiliates, though: Trenton had already been announced as part of the new MLB Dream League, and on Wednesday, the announcement had Columbia as the new Low-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, and Charleston is now the Low-A team of the Tampa Bay Rays.
Staten Island still remains without an affiliation of any kind, one of a handful of previous franchises not absolved into either the Dream League or another MLB-affiliated collegiate league (like the Appy).
Among other notable changes: the Red Sox officially moved their Triple-A affiliate from Pawtucket to Worcester; the Blue Jays officially kept one of their affiliates in Canada, installing their former Short-Season Class-A team in Vancouver as their Low-A team (eliminating Lansing, who had been their Class-A team since 2005 and is now an Oakland High-A affiliate); and the Twins and Astros each revealed their new Triple-A affiliates, pulling in the formerly-independent St. Paul Saints and Sugar Land Skeeters.
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