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It’s like The Hunger Games, but with baseball affiliations.

Minor league baseball has been in a decidedly lousy situation for the entire duration of the pandemic. Health mandates were hitting the major leagues hard enough; without the sheer dollars of the majors, the minor leagues have barely been able to run any games. While the major leagues have been figuring out how to keep the games going in a COVID-era America, minor leaguers have been debating with them the entire time, trying desperately to secure funding and support. The good news is that the major league is offering official affiliations to minor league teams, which should get them some much-needed funding. The bad news is that not everyone is getting it.

Yesterday, each of the major league’s 30 main franchises selected four minor league teams to offer sponsorship to, 120 teams in all. This means that about 43 minor league teams, about 25% of the entire minor league, is being left out in the cold. Several minor league teams that have been left out of the 120 have expressed frustration with being passed up, including the Tri-City ValleyCats, the Lexington Legends, and the Kane County Cougars.

“You look at the facility, the attendance, you look at the fan base, you look at the geography,” ValleyCats president Rick Murphy told Fox News. “You look at the market size and what we’ve been able to do for the last 18 years, and you would think it would have put us in a good position to be part of the 120.”

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“At this point, we’re not sure where we’re going to end up,” Cougars vice president and general manager Curtis Haug told the Chicago Tribune. “The baseball landscape has changed quite a bit.”

In the current state of things, nobody seems to have a concrete idea of what the teams that didn’t make the 120 are supposed to do. The only available options are start over as independent franchises or try to become affiliates of one of the teams that made the cut. Of course, considering the pandemic is still raging in America, the former likely isn’t feasible, while the selected teams likely won’t be eager to share resources in the latter’s case.