WISCONSIN (SPECTRUM NEWS) -- These are anxious times for minor league baseball teams. Major League Baseball has announced its intentions to trim the number of minor league teams and is shortening its amateur draft to just five rounds next month.

With that backdrop, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers franchise, a Class A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers, is waiting for word on the fate of its 2020 season.

In an interview with Spectrum News 1, Timber Rattlers President Rob Zerjav described the process. “As a part of Major League Baseball, Minor League Baseball is waiting for Major League Baseball to make a decision on what they’re going to do. With that said, it’s just a matter of are they going to have Minor League Baseball? Major League Baseball has the television contract so they’re going to be able to most likely play without fans. That probably isn’t something that Minor League teams are looking to do.”

Minor league teams rely heavily on ticket sales and concessions. Could the Timber Rattlers survive if there's no season or a season without fans? “Survival, yes. Is it going to be a struggle? Definitely. For us, 90% of our revenue is generated April through August. Without and games and any fans, we’re not getting the ticket revenue. We’re not getting parking revenue, the food and beverage revenue, the store revenue. Even your corporate sponsors, they’re not going to be advertising if there’s nobody in the stands," Zerjav said.

The Timber Rattlers have a great reputation as innovators so it's no surprise that Zerjav and his franchise have tried to adjust in these unprecedented times.

“We’ve gotten creative. One of the programs we’ve reintroduced is our team memberships. It’s sort of like the Packers and their stock sale. We are a community owned team.  They get a membership. We have a volunteer board of directors. You get to vote on who our board members are. You come to our annual meeting each year. There’s other perks to it. We reintroduced that. That’s a fifty dollar membership. We also have a banquet facility at the stadium and we’ve always had Easter brunch and Mother's Day brunch and when Easter (and Mother's Day) came around and we weren’t able to have brunch, we’ve done meals that folks can pick up. That went over really well. Then people wanted to have ballpark meals so we started to do that as well. We’ve done that twice and sold both of those meals out. Little things that are helping but definitely not taking the place of playing baseball games.”