Minor Leagues in Pre Draft Days

[Orioles5]

Looking through baseball-reference.com I am suprised at how few minor league teams are afflilated with a major league team in the pre draft days. I was wondering how a player got signed to a contract by a baseball team and how did teams not afflilated with a major league team figure in to developing players for the major leagues?

[Biggtone23]

My basic understanding of it was that there was still a hierarchy of leagues. A player would go to an open tryout or be invited to try out with a team at one level and if he made it and was then sucessful his contract would get bought by a team in another league higher up and so on until a big league team would buy his contract. The big league team could still loan him out to a minor league team if he was struggling at the big league level.

[Orioles5]

Thanks for the explanation. Looking through baseball-reference.com players jumped around to different teams and leagues quite a bit. There are some players that played for 4 different teams in a season and players who were traded from one team to a different team in the same league.