This article originally appeared in The Fordham Ram in May 2018.
For some, baseball’s minor leagues are a tune-up for a long and successful professional career. For others, it is a constant struggle to be noticed by big-league scouts. And for the rest, the minors are the last stop in a player’s professional career.
But they are not, apparently, a lucrative enterprise.
A new bill passed in Congress just over a month ago, that includes a provision ironically called the “Save America’s Pastime Act” exempts minor league baseball players from federal labor laws.
This means a couple of simple things:
1. Players don’t need to be paid minimum wage.
2. Players don’t need to be compensated for potential overtime wages.
You may be thinking that Major League Baseball can’t afford to pay its players adequate wages. After all, many say that the sport is “dying” and things that are supposedly on life support don’t pull in a lot of revenue.
I am here to tell you that this argument is a load of garbage.
Here’s why: last season, the sport whose audience is dying and whose games are way too long, set a record for annual revenue with over $10 billion made last season alone. The sport, at least on a financial level, is growing at a meteoric rate; the league has increased its revenue by roughly $500 million since 2015, and MLB recently sold part of BAMtech, a derivative of its highly-successful MLB Advanced Media venture, for $1.58 billion. If you want an indication of how lucrative the sport is, retired outfielder Bobby Bonilla will rake in $1 million from the Mets every July 1 until 2035. Bobby Bonilla last played for the Mets in 1999.
An investigation by Sporting News found that single-A players will be making $1,160 per month this season. Even when spread out over 12 months, that figure comes out to $13,920 per year, which is sub-optimal to say the least. However, full season players only get paid during the year, which lasts only five-and-a-half months. The deal is even worse for short-season single-A players, who only play for three months, at the most. The math works out as follows: full season players get $6,380 per year while short-season players get $3,480. Players make more money if they get to AA and AAA, but the Sporting News investigation found that a AAA player’s minimum salary per year is just $11,825 per year. Of course, you may think that this isn’t too bad because minor league players get free housing along with their subpar contracts. Unfortunately, I have news for you: they don’t.
Some players get signing bonuses when they are drafted or sign with a team out of high school, college or the international market. However, there are many players who don’t, and those people are the reason why baseball should take care of its own and pay its players a livable wage. It’s not just me saying this, either: a 2014 article by Sports Illustrated’s Michael McCann showed that minor league baseball players make less than half the yearly income of fast-food workers. With the amount of money, or lack thereof, that players make, many of them likely need to get offseason jobs just to pay for everyday expenses. This is to say nothing of their offseason training programs and participation in fall and winter leagues. Players are already too busy with these things to have time for other jobs, and they shouldn’t have to take a minimum wage job at a CVS because a multi-billion dollar franchise doesn’t want to pay them living wages.
And while we’re on that subject, can we please talk about how exploitative this entire arrangement is? Major League Baseball is awash in money and can absolutely afford to pay the less privileged amongst them the money to get by while they are still in the minor leagues. Rob Manfred is not exactly running a makeshift operation on Park Avenue; if the Marlins can pay Giancarlo Stanton $3 million per year to play against them, there is no reason why the sport can’t pick up the tab to make sure blue-collar minor league players can afford to live a decent life in the minors.
Besides all of this, though, why haven’t we decided that paying people a livable wage is a decent idea? There are some small businesses who are short on cash and have to pay employees as little as possible. Despite that, the vast majority of these businesses are ethical and follow the United States’ labor laws on a budget that is approximately 0.0000001 percent that of Major League Baseball’s. That being said, we should seriously evaluate whether or not the sport has the best interests of its least affluent players in mind, as the rich have gotten richer at the highest levels of the game but minor leaguers have not seen any trickle-down effects from baseball’s sustained wealth.
The decision should not be hard for Major League Baseball. They should pay livable, lawful and ethical wages to its minor league players. After all, it’s not like they can’t afford to do it.