Minor League Baseball is being restructured and realigned this offseason, causing much confusion and speculation about whether major league teams would be changing their affiliates at multiple levels.
Things are starting to sort themselves out now. On Wednesday, Major League Baseball formally invited minor league affiliates to join the new "system."
Nothing is official yet, because invited minor league franchises need to sign "Professional Development Licenses." The licenses are essentially an acceptance of the aforementioned invitation.
There are 120 minor league teams that received invitations -- four for each major league club. You can find a complete list of invitations here.
What does this mean for the White Sox? Turns out, not much. The Sox on Wednesday invited Triple-A Charlotte, Double-A Birmingham, High-A Winston-Salem and Low-A Kannapolis to be their minor league affiliates for 2021.
Apparently, Kannapolis is changing its nickname from the Intimidators to the Cannon Ballers, but aside from that, the Sox's minor league affiliates are the same as they were in the good ol' pre-pandemic days of 2019.
As a matter of fact, the Sox are the only team among the 30 to have the exact same full-season affiliate alignment in 2021 that they had in 2019.
Thirteen other clubs maintained their affiliates, but there are changes in hierarchy because of league shifts.
There was some speculation that Winston-Salem and Kannapolis would end up in the same league because of realignments in the East Coast A-ball leagues. If that had happened, the Sox would have had to find at least one new Class-A affiliate.
That ended up not happening, so everything is status quo, and the Sox still comfortably have all their minor league teams tucked in the Southeast.
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