Baseball in the United States the Atlanta Braves' affiliates except the Carolina Mudcats. Minor League teams that are owned directly by the major league Club do not have PDCs with each other and are not part of the reaffiliation shuffles that occur every other year. A special minor league is the Arizona Fall League. It operates outside the Minor League Baseball hierarchy and is owned by MLB as a whole; teams generally assign prospects from the AAA and AA classes to the league's six teams. Today, 19 affiliated minor baseball leagues operate with 246 member clubs in large, medium, and small towns, as well as
Western League (Japanese baseball) League contains the minor league affiliates of five Japanese professional teams (minor league homefield shown in parentheses): Western League (Japanese baseball) The is one of the two minor leagues ("ni-gun") of Japanese professional baseball. The league is owned and managed by the Pacific League of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). Teams in the Western League generally play an 80-game schedule every year. The league was created in 1952 as the Kansai Farm League, and was initially completely separate from the workings of the Nippon Professional Baseball. It featured the minor league teams of the six professional teams that had their homefields