Storyline: Year after year thousands of minor leaguers play baseball all over the country–with low pay, long hours, and no job security–to get a shot at The Bigs. How might a lawsuit against MLB change that picture?
In my column, When Minor Becomes Major, I extoll the virtues of Minor League Baseball. Going to the ballpark was a central feature of my youth. It still is for many kids around the country. Great family fun, it’s inexpensive, engaging, and entertaining.
Courtesy: ranker.com
Minor league baseball produces local economic benefits, too. It creates jobs in sports administration, facilities management, marketing, and customer service, and it generates local tax revenues.
What could be better?
Well, lurking beneath the positives is one of baseball’s chronic dark spaces. In exchange for a shot at “The Bigs” most minor league players earn next to nothing. Baseball America estimates that players make between $275 and $550 a week during the minor league season. The average salary works out to be between $3000 and $7500 a year, depending on player and league level.
Compare that to what a minimum wage worker earns in this country: about $15k a year. Mets’ Curtis Granderson was quoted in USA Today as saying that a minor league friend of his has $100 a month left after paying for living expenses and taxes.
MLB, which governs Minor League Baseball, has an anti-trust exception on its side: it pays what it prefers. And the players don’t have a union to represent them.
Courtesy: Savannah Sand Gnats
Granted, MLB pays some players very well: there are signing bonuses and money for college scholarships. But, in several fundamental ways, the minor leagues resemble a sweatshop.
Minor league baseball needs large numbers of low-paid workers—year after year—to keep operations alive and to ensure that owners make enough money to keep the doors open. Players work long hours (factor in travel-time bus rides) and they don’t have job security, either. The big difference is that there’s “hope,” hope that someday, some players will make it big.
This is a business, after all, and Minor League Baseball is acting like it. There is talk that League executives will seek Federal action to add baseball to the list of occupations where workers are exempt from receiving the Federal minimum wage. The move, which some see as a reaction to the national trend to raise hourly pay (as a means to reduce income inequality), is onerous for minor leaguers. If the concept becomes law, then minor leaguers will be in the same pay category as—get this—farm workers and babysitters.
It’s no surprise, then, that a group of former minor leaguers has filed a lawsuit against the MLB. It’s about pay. One of the arguments: the inflation rate in this country has increased 400% since 1976, USA Today reports, but the pay for minor leaguers has increased by 75%. Salaries for major leaguers, on the other hand, has increased over 2000%.
A trial date is scheduled for February 2017. If former players win the case, that outcome could change the landscape of Minor League Baseball. Some speculate it could lead to MiLB’s contraction, that is, force some teams in smaller markets to close their doors.
Courtesy: totalprosports.com
But business closings are always a possibility whenever there are significant pay issues between labor and management. The difference this time may be the attitudes of those most affected—the players. How many minor leaguers are likely to speak up with their careers on the line?
That’s especially the case in an occupation where workers have gone through identical experiences, generation after generation, with low pay, long hours, and uncertain futures. Perhaps that’s why some major leaguers don’t have much sympathy with their minor league brethren. As Jorge Ortis wrote in USA Today: “Many current major leaguers see the grind of the minors as a rite of passage and even an incentive to work on their game to earn a promotion.”
Let’s see how this matter gets resolved. In the name of fairness, I hope we can have our baseball and fair compensation, too.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/baseball-broshuis-minor-league-wage-income
Major League Baseball stars routinely command eight-figure annual salaries; even journeymen with a few years’ major-league experience bring home millions every year. And every summer, the top high-school and college players receive multimillion-dollar bonuses when they sign with the teams that picked them in the annual June amateur draft.
But the majority of professional players don’t get huge signing bonuses and spend the bulk of their careers in the minor leagues. Only about 17% of players drafted and signed from 1987 through 2008 played at least one game in the major leagues, according to a 2013 survey by trade magazine Baseball America.
