Major League Baseball (MLB) players are among the highest-paid athletes in the world, as salaries for the Top 100 players easily surpasses that of every other major American sport. Overlooked in the career of every Major League Baseball player, however, are the years of playing and developing in the Minor Leagues. The Minor Leagues are a necessary step in every baseball career. Players typically play at least one to two years in the Minor Leagues before being called up to play in the Majors, but that time can easily be much longer as most baseball players never become Major League players.
Many times, it is not a lack of talent that stops the Minor League players from ascending to Major League status, but instead the lack of pay. Minor League players are only paid during their season and are paid based on their pay level: Single – A , Double – A, and Triple – A. These salaries are, respectively, $6,000, $9,350, and $15,000 for the season. The 2020 Poverty Guidelines show that for one person, anything under $12,760 is below the poverty line. Therefore, according to these salaries, any minor leaguer below Triple-A would fall beneath the poverty line. Many of these players also have families to support, making this circumstance even harder. Minor League pay is also only for club sanctioned activity, thus training and equipment is not paid for, and Minor League players are not paid for attending spring training where they usually work 12 hours a day. Salaries do not include signing bonuses that players receive when they are signed, yet these bonuses vary drastically. A first-round pick could receive over $1,000,000, but someone in the later rounds may have a signing bonus of only $5,000 or less.
Major League Baseball has extreme control over its players, particularly minor league players, since the ruling in the 1922 Supreme Court case, Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs et al. In this case, America’s two largest baseball leagues: the National League and the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, which would later become interlinked and form the singular Major League Baseball, were attempting to monopolize the sport by buying out members of the Federal League of Professional Baseball Players. At this time, the sport was truly America’s pastime making it an incredibly lucrative business. Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs et al. reached the Supreme Court due to what they believed were violations of the Sherman Act. The Sherman Act is meant to protect a “free and unfettered competition as the rule of trade.” Despite the National and American League of Professional Baseball clubs creating a monopoly, the Supreme Court ruled that it was not a violation of the Sherman Act. The Court opined that a baseball game did not count as trade or commerce, thus it could not be subject to the Sherman Act.
After the Supreme Court decided that the unification of the two leagues was not a violation of the Sherman Act, a monopoly was formed. Major League Baseball currently holds all of the leverage in negotiations with players, as there are no real alternative career pathways in the United States when it comes to baseball. Many players from Japan, Korea, Mexico, and the Domican Republic immigrate to the United States to continue their careers in baseball, making the decision to emigrate from the US a non-viable answer as the MLB is seen as the pinnacle of the sport. Baseball’s pool of players is also incredibly saturated, meaning that if one player quits baseball because they cannot afford to live on the salary that minor leaguers are given, there is another player who can take their place. The combination of a saturated labor pool and a single baseball league leaves players, particularly minor league players with no national stardom or union, almost no leverage as there are no other places to play baseball. The players that do have leverage are Major League Baseball players who are making hundreds of millions of dollars over their career and who also have national recognition. The MLB’s executive office will pay attention if Max Scherzer, for instance, is unhappy with the conditions he is forced to work with, but not if an 8th round draft pack from 2017 is unhappy with his work conditions or his pay.
Major League Baseball played minor leaguers below minimum wage by classifying the players as “seasonal workers.” If Major League Baseball did not receive this wage exemption, they would not be able to pay the minor league players the current amounts. The reasoning behind the MLB designating Minor League Baseball Players as seasonal workers is because the MLB only sees the players as working during the season, not during spring training nor during the offseason. This can be a point of contention between the league and players, as players would argue that they are honing their skills throughout the year, not only during the designated season. Despite already minuscule pay, Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball have continuously sought to remove minimum wage protections for players. Congress passed H.R. 5580: “Save America’s Pastime Act” in 2018, which strips away the MLB’s Fair Labor Standards Act exemption. This legally allows the teams to pay players below the minimum wage requirement without receiving a special exemption. The act also does not allow players to be paid for overtime, which is a point of contention for the players as they often work more than 40 hours.
Arguments against this act state that this federal law should not be allowed to supersede state law, thus players should be paid according to state minimum wage standards. Particularly, Florida and Arizona state law should be altered, as that is where Spring Training takes place in non-coronavirus times. Seeking refuge in state laws can also be a double-sided sword. Seeking to be paid the minimum wage in each state would raise the pay of the minor league players according to where they played. This would cause a large disparity between the payment of players based simply off of where one plays as the minimum wage in Kansas is much lower than the minimum wage in a state like Vermont. This would be much harder to obtain as the minor leaguers would have to file class action lawsuits in multiple different states, instead of just a singular class action lawsuit. This would be incredibly costly to pay for the attorney fees of the lawyers in each different state, especially as they do not have a union.
The “Save America’s Pastime Act” has only been the start of what has become a series of unfortunate events for minor league baseball players. In 2020, Major League Baseball announced a plan to cut roughly 40 minor league baseball affiliated teams. This would affect hundreds of baseball prospects as well as the economies of the towns losing minor league baseball affiliated teams. With the coronavirus, Major League Baseball came to an agreement with the Major League Baseball Player’s Association to cut the draft from 40 rounds to as little as 5, with undrafted players signing bonuses being capped at $20,000.
Efforts to help Minor League Players have increased since 2018 when the economic toll of being a minor league player was truly brought to light. H.R. 6020 was proposed to force the Government Accountability Office to report “contributions that Minor League Baseball has made to American Life and Culture.” The bill is meant to be used as a bargaining chip on behalf of Minor League Baseball in order to get higher wages for players and stop the elimination of 42 minor league affiliated baseball teams. While the bill has passed the House of Representatives it is still waiting to be voted on by the Senate. This bill has become a hot button issue, particularly for representatives who have minor league teams in their districts, as failure to adopt H.R. 6020 could be disastrous for the economy of those regions. With the agreement between Minor League Baseball and Major League Baseball terminating after this 2020 season, Major League Baseball has made it clear that it does not plan on continuing the partnership and will take control of Minor League Baseball. The reasoning behind this is that they believe that they will be able to run Minor League in a more cost effective way; many fear that this will include cutting more teams and reducing the amount of minor league players. There is currently a class action lawsuit, Senne v. Royals, working its way through the judicial system against Major League Baseball by minor league players, suing the MLB for paying less than minimum wage. The Supreme Court denied MLB’s request to see the case seen as a ‘win’ for minor league players as they strive for a livable wage. While minor league wages are set to raise between 38% to 72% across its different levels in 2021, this wage increase would still not allow the players to live a livable wage, especially when the MLB’s starting salary is $563,500.