As Major League Baseball is finally gearing up toward a 2020 season, Minor League Baseball recently saw the official cancellation of its season.
While plenty of hurdles remain for MLB, their players and teams are in a better position than their minor league counterparts. In the three-plus months with no baseball, one of the storylines has been what is happening to minor league players. They’re only paid a paltry monthly stipend to begin with and in some cases were not given those this year. The White Sox continued to pay their minor leaguers through July, but not every team did so.
This stoppage raised a number of questions from the minor league perspective. FutureSox is a website focused on minor leaguers and prospects after all. In short:
The combination of there not being a minor league season and chunk of players not getting paid could lead to an exodus of current minor leaguers. Many have been left out in the cold during the pandemic. Some players will be more affected than others by the lost season, but many may decide to look for a different career. It will be years before all the long-term effects of this become evident.
“The reality is it’s still not a living wage, you know?” Kyle Peterson of ESPN and the SEC Network said on a June 3 episode of the FutureSox Podcast.. “I mean $1,600 a month during the season? No, it just doesn’t pencil and then whenever the theoretical season ends, now what the hell do I do? It’s only understandable that it speeds up a decision for a lot of guys to say you know what, it’s time to go get a real job. But that may be healthy. We all gotta do it at some point. I remember the day I had to and it sucked. It’s a life reality, but this has sped up that potential decision process for a lot of different guys.
“From a minor league organization standpoint, I don’t know. I’m not in that game. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be sitting there if you’re a Triple-A or Double-A team or name your level and you’re not going to have a season and you don’t know exactly what it looks like going forward. Because I think the one absolute through this is whatever we thought was normal before, it doesn’t matter if it’s baseball, if it’s life, if it’s going to the grocery store, whatever we thought was normal before, it ain’t normal anymore and it’s not gonna be. There’s gonna be a new set of normal rules as we get through this and Minor League Baseball is going to be no different. I just hope it ends with something that protects these guys more because at this point, honestly, they have very little protection.”
What kind of protection could exist? Could they unionize like their MLB counterparts?
There’s no simple answer to those questions, but Minor League Baseball was already in an vulnerable position. There were reports of 42 teams being removed from the MiLB umbrella back in November. The idea, as Jeff Passan said on a June 2 episode of the ESPN Daily podcast, was to “streamline” operations in the minors and make them more efficient from a financial perspective.
“(Teams and front offices) feel like with the advent of technology these days it has really helped them assess players at a much younger age and have a sense of who has what it takes to get to the big leagues and be a successful player,” Passan said.
In other words, MLB front offices and talent evaluators believe they can get by with fewer minor league teams. There’s evidence to say this is a plausible hypothesis, but this meant the coronavirus pandemic hit when Minor League Baseball was already being marginalized. MLB decision makers were thinking of MiLB as a bloated expense at a time when almost all of their revenue streams were halted.
“Now, after coronavirus, the entire calculus has changed,” Passan said. “It’s not just 40 teams that could disappear, it’s a lot more.
“Without fans in the stands, Minor League Baseball teams are running the risk of becoming insolvent.”
Minor league teams don’t have lucrative TV or radio deals to offer a form of revenue during the pandemic. No gate means no revenue.
Now imagine you’re a minor leaguer. In most cases you’re already forced to take a second job in the offseason. This year you have no way to do your job. As the pandemic continued, you slowly came to the realization that you weren’t going to have a season at all. While Major League Baseball and the MLBPA had an offputting public negotiation about how and when to play the 2020 season, minor leaguers were left with no protection. They were at the mercy of ownership, or in some cases the players.
Of course, this is ironic considering how minor leaguers have been left unprotected by the MLBPA for years. The latest example was this year’s five-round draft, which had deferred signing bonus money and a limit on bonuses to undrafted players.
“For years now the MLBPA has completely sold out minor leaguers,” Passan said. “That’s the part of this that goes unspoken quite a bit. They’ve sold out minor leaguers in the draft and you’ve seen that in a number of ways and they’ve sold them out by not allowing them into the union or helping them form any kind of union.
“Look, it is called the Major League Baseball Players’ Association. It’s understandable that they’re not going to allow minor leaguers in, but the vast, vast, vast, vast majority, almost the entirety of players in the MLBPA right now once played in the minor league system and it was only when they got to the major leagues that they recognized the value of the union and understood the power of the union. The problem, of course, is that every dollar that is spent on minor leagues and minor league players is probably not going to go where it does now, which is major league players. That has been the inherent conflict there and really the reason that the MLBPA has not done more for minor leaguers.”
There has been some push for increased pay for minor leaguers. The Blue Jays already decided to increase pay by 50%. Minor league pay hasn’t changed much in recent decades, which has made things worse.
“I was extremely fortunate that I was a first-rounder so what I was making on a monthly basis, that wasn’t how I was feeding myself, but for many they are,” Peterson said. “This is 20 years ago, upwards. Our salary when we were in rookie ball was $850 a month. In A ball it was $1,000, in Double-A it was $1,500 and in Triple-A it was $2,100 and they only pay you during the season. That’s pretty simple math to do. I think meal money was 20 bucks on the road and the last time I checked those numbers haven’t moved a whole lot. Think about numbers that haven’t moved a whole lot in the last 22 years. There aren’t too many. It is time. It’s time that there’s a unified voice.
“The point is not for minor league guys to be making $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 all the way around, but pay them enough to pay rent. Pay enough to where if you really consider them as potential, legitimate prospects that they can go workout in the offseason. That they don’t need another job immediately when the season ends. This is better for the organizations long-term and I don’t know that we’ll get there, but I would love it if through this the minor league system and the players look at it and say, ‘You know what? It’s time for us to unionize.'”
That’s the why of the situation. These conditions have led to an MiLB union of some sort making sense. How such a union would be formed and operate are questions that don’t have easy answers. Peterson suggested it could work under the umbrella of the MLBPA, which doesn’t benefit players until they reach a 40-man roster.
“The better of our game is to represent them all,” Peterson said.
Of course, that complicates any negotiating process going forward. The Athletic’s Emily Waldon, speaking on the FutureSox Podcast on June 9, said the complications would be worth it.
“It might actually add another layer of complexity to the whole process, but I think you would see more justice done,” Waldon said. “I know one of the biggest takeaways that I’ve had from speaking with the players is that they are all extremely quick to acknowledge ‘We don’t deserve big league money. We know that. We are just starting out.’
“They know that they’re not going to get big bucks, but when you start to dangle at the poverty line, that’s not acceptable. Under no circumstances should an employee in this country, no matter what your occupation, you should not be at that level and have your employer get away with it. It’s not acceptable under any scenario. I think if you were to have a form of representation, you would have a voice at the table. I think you would be able to have your concerns put out there. You would be able to have those things presented in a respected way and they just don’t have that right now.”
She also mentioned how the different ways players are signed into the minors would add nuance to any negotiations. Different players will want different things, but that’s no different than the MLBPA, where the big money players have different interests than most players.
“There’s so much of a variety to the backgrounds from the international signing process to high school kids to college kids,” Waldon said. “There’s so many different walks of life that you’re working with that they believe it sort of adds more complexity and it makes the process of building a union of that sort, it makes it tougher. So I think unless you’re able to streamline the minor league signing process, I think it’s still going to be a bit of a struggle to get that put together on the union side. I’m hoping they start to figure that out a little bit more moving forward.”
If they don’t figure it out, players will remain vulnerable as we continue barreling toward an uncertain future for Minor League Baseball.
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Baseball, unlike football and (to a lesser degree) basketball, doesn’t utilize colleges for their minor league system. Where’s the money going to come from? Mandating major league teams to pay much higher wages to minor leaguers would probably bankrupt a few. In the end, it would mean fewer majoreague teams and fewer draft picks. Nothing should be judged by this tear. Be careful what you hope for!
Giving minor leaguers a percentage raise on a small monthly stipend when there are probably going to be fewer minor league teams in the future (which means fewer minor league players) would not mean fewer major league teams.
Here’s an idea: All major league players, after they have amassed $1 million dollars earned in their careers, are taxed(no idea how much, like 1% or something) and that goes into a pot for minor leaguers. A small percentage of your salary, after you’ve become a millionaire, going back to the people you came up with. That is where the money should come from. I don’t think those millionaire major leaguers would have a problem with that because they were once right there with those guys.