Owners are killing the minor leagues

Bill Veeck once said that baseball was the only sport played by normal sized people; to play basketball you had to be 7-feet tall, to play football you had to be 7-feet wide.  Obviously, Bill Veeck had never seen Mark McGuire.

Athletes have more options these days in choosing what sport to pursue, and baseball seems intent on driving high-quality athletes to consider basketball or football as a higher priority.  In 2018 the Save America’s Past-time Act was signed into law as part of the federal spending bill, which should have been named the Save Billionaire Owners A Few Bucks Act.  The language, which was a footnote in the 2,200 page document, exempted the minor leagues from federal minimum wage and worker safety laws.  This for an industry where most workers make less than $7,500 per year. 

Minor league players make so little that when the Washington Nationals announced they were releasing all their minor league players, the players on the Nationals offered to pay their lost wages.  The Nationals were embarrassed enough to reinstate the weekly stipend of $300-400.  Individual players like David Price have also pledged financial support for minor leaguers.

It has been pointed out (I can’t find a citation) that the diets of minor league players are usually unhealthy because they can’t afford to eat nutritious food, so they often binge on fast food or try to survive on ramen.  For a modest expenditure a major league team could feed their AAA and AA players a healthy diet and protect their investment, but this isn’t done.

Baseball is now providing even less incentive for athletes to choose baseball over another sport by reducing the draft from 40 rounds to just five rounds.  Any player not drafted in those five rounds couldn’t sign for more than $20,000.   Incredibly, minor league salaries are so paltry even this wholesale slashing of salaries will only save a couple of million dollars per team.

So, baseball will be paying its minor league workforce below minimum wage salaries, making bonuses smaller, and giving contracts to fewer players, expecting many of the players to spend a few years in college before making another go at earning a spot in The Show.

What is happening in other sports?  In basketball, the NBA is now letting top high school prospects turn pro by going to the G League.  Players don’t even have to pretend to go to college for one year to get to the NBA.  Other high schoolers are opting to play overseas.  No working for below minimum wage for several years before cashing in.

Football players still have to endure three years of college before going pro, but the NCAA is slowly caving to the pressure to allow collegiate athletes to make money on their "name, likeness, and image." They are being dragged kicking and screaming, but it is happening.  Of course, this will be most valuable to quarterbacks and running backs and less so for interior linemen, but it is just the start.   The movement to pay college players a small part of the billions of dollars of revenue they generate appears to be unstoppable.

So while high school athletes in basketball and (eventually) football will be able to cash in right out of school, baseball decided to take their grossly underpaid minor league work force and pay them even less. 

Mike Piazza was drafted in the 62^nd round of the draft, and he is now in Cooperstown.  Would he have stuck with baseball if he was undrafted and had to fight for a position that would pay him a maximum of $20,000?  As one of the previously cited articles pointed out, baseball drafting is an inexact science and many baseball stars and Hall of famers were drafted outside the 5^th round.  Whither these players in a five-round draft?

The all-consuming greed of baseball owners is well documented in books like Lords of the Realm by John Helyar and The Game by Jeff Passan.  In The Game, Passan describes how in the 1990’s the owners were concerned about the competitive balance and small market teams, but instead of redistributing their revenue they expected ball players to enable small market teams to compete by taking a pay cut (and were stunned when the players refused).  Recently, many African-American players and former players have detailed what t was like to be assigned to a minor league team in the South.

But the owners are now cutting expenditures on a minor league system that has always exploited young men’s desire to play baseball by paying them slave wages for several years and putting up with substandard travel and third-rate motels.  They have a cheap source of labor and yet they want to make it cheaper. 

Cutting off your nose to spite your face seems like an inadequate metaphor.