The Exploitation of Minor League Baseball Players

Ashford University Field, home of the Clinton LumberKings

Lucas Mann, at Slate:

In February, three former minor leaguers sued Major League Baseball for violation of wage and overtime laws, alleging that they’re “powerless” in the face of the “collusive power of the MLB cartel.” A month later, the suit was amended to include more former players from 17 different organizations, as well as one current minor leaguer. These men had the courage to put into writing what anybody who has spent time around a minor league team already knows: Players are wildly underpaid for the obscene amount of hours they work.

More specifically, the suit argues that minor league compensation violates the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that any employee’s pay not fall below minimum wage and that all employees receive time-and-a-half for work done beyond a standard 40-hour week. Michael McCann has a great legal analysis at Sports Illustrated, which notes that baseball franchises are not exempt from this federal law, and it “may therefore be difficult for baseball to convince a judge to swiftly dismiss the case.” He continues by suggesting that the “longer the case goes, the more willing baseball may be to settle and perhaps change the way minor leaguers are paid.”...
Minor league base salaries are even public information, right there on the official website: a $1,100 monthly maximum for first-year players, with a $25 per diem, all of that paid only during the five- to six-month season. Salaries are “open to negotiation” after the first season, but what leverage do the players have? (There is no minor league players union.) At the highest rung of the minors, AAA, a player can expect to earn more than $2,000 monthly, some a good deal more. Those players, though, have already put a lot of years into the game, and the pay remains a pittance at the lower levels, where most major league hopefuls remain.

I spent the 2010 season writing about the single-A Clinton LumberKings. I came to the project because I was enamored by this vague idea of the minors—coltish, gifted young men on borrowed furniture, surrounded by pizza boxes, buoyed by limitless ambition. I got what I went looking for. The only surprise was how quickly the romance of the image began to comingle with the sense that this was all entirely indefensible.
The LumberKings players lived in a small, struggling Iowa town, where many of them (those who didn’t receive big signing bonuses) were among the poorest residents. And they knew it. Every day, they were reminded of it. They lived in the town’s worst apartment complexes. They crammed four or five players into one- and two-bedroom apartments, sometimes studios. On biweekly paydays, they would climb into my hatchback and I’d drive to the Super Walmart at the edge of town, where some would cash their checks, buy groceries in bulk, and try to work out how much extra money they’d need for the next 14 days. They returned home exhausted, some sleeping side-by-side on air mattresses on the floor, got up the next day, and went to work as professional athletes.

You would think that with the money made on major league baseball that minor leaguers could be better paid.  Considering how the Dayton Dragons do, I'd say the minors could afford to pay the players more, but I've been to Clinton, and the difference between the Dragons and the LumberKings (even though they are both in the Midwest League) is massive.  The LumberKings play in an old stadium built by the WPA with capacity of 4,000, generally seeing a third of that, while the Dragons play in a stadium built in 2000, with a capacity of 8,200, which has been sold out since it opened.  When I went to the LumberKings game, I was able to walk up to the ticket window and buy a seat in the first row behind home plate, and only had a few people in the section around me.  Until the last couple of years in Dayton, I could barely find tickets.

Anyway, my point is that paying a few thousand players something above minimim wage would seem doable in the world of professional sports.  With this, the NLRB ruling that Northwestern University football players could form a union, and Ed O'Bannon's lawsuit against the NCAA working its way through the courts, maybe we'll see a little bit of the big money of sports shared with its most underpaid performers.  We've gone too long thinking athletes who make little to nothing are just lucky to be chasing a dream.  They should be able to afford food.