Minor League Baseball Players are getting more money and people are upset for some reason
Major League Baseball announced that they would be increasing minor league wages at all levels, starting with the 2021 season. Quite a few words have been spilled in praise of MLB FINALLY taking the first steps that they should have taken years ago so that this announced raise would finally allow players to end up at least earning a living wage. However, when reviewing the comments from many, this pay raise has found the chord that really brings out those who speak to the owners’ desires not to make these moves. Rather than a piece explaining why minor leaguers should be paid even more, this will be an examination of the some of the most popular responses in the comment section of this announcement.
The players make more than a minimum wage worker in a week, why should I care about their fight?!
Let’s truly break that one down. When many saw that rookie-level players would be earning $400 per week, they saw that a minimum wage worker, even in states that haven’t boosted the minimum from the federal minimum, makes $290 per week, so players really don’t have it that bad!
First, just so we’re comparing apples to apples for a week, of the 50 states, 29 have minimum wage above the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. Of those, 18 states have a minimum wage that would earn someone working 40 hours equal to or more than $400 per month. Of the 32 states that remain below $10 per hour for a minimum wage, four have no minor league team, so that means that we’re actually discussing 28 states that this even applies to in the first place.
With that on the table, I took the time to talk with a pair of former minor league players, and one current minor league player, to understand the time invested for the players. First, realize that this is only what players make IN SEASON. A minor league player that is at spring training or fall instructs is not being paid. The hours put in during that time is not paid at all. The three players told me that their time was actually less in spring, but that meant that they were actually putting in around 40-50 hours per week.
One of the former players had tallied his time when he was in short-season advanced rookie ball. Among time spent doing team workouts, at required pregame workouts and meetings, games, individual workouts, and travel time, he averaged 73 hours per week during his season of advanced rookie ball. That was over the course of 11 weeks. He didn’t make $400 per week at that time, but if we were to take that pay over 11 weeks, that would be $4,400 pre-tax pay to the player. Averaging 73 hours per week over 11 weeks would be 803 hours spent working during the season, or $5.48 per hour.
However, that same player mentioned that he had been at the team facility without pay from the team for 18 weeks, and also participated in fall instructs for another two weeks, giving him 20 unpaid weeks. Even if he was only doing team activities 40 hours per week for all weeks that he was part of the team from spring training through fall instructs, that’d be 31 weeks, at 40 hours per week, for 1,240 hours total. For those hours, he’s still paid the same $4,400, or $3.55 per hour. That doesn’t even take into account that the player was spending over 70 hours per week doing team functions during the 11 weeks he was being paid!
Players come into baseball with big signing bonuses. That’s supposed to cover them until they make it to the major leagues!
To be honest, this question seems to have come from someone who stopped paying attention to the business of baseball roughly a decade ago. The Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) signed in November of 2011 eliminated major league contracts and unlimited bonuses from the Rule 4 draft, which is the June draft that brings in so many of the players in the United States to MLB. That same CBA brought in the spending limits for international bonuses along with significant penalties to teams that went over those limits. The most recent CBA took the international spending a step further, really taking away the opportunity for signees from foreign countries to sign “huge bonus” sorts of deals.
In the 2019 draft, 916 of the players signed that were selected over the three days. There were 72 of those that were given a bonus of seven figures, and that would be the basis of this argument. However, that also represents less than 10% of the draft. Nearly 25% of the draft (221 players) signed for less than $10,000 bonus.
Even when considering that bonus, realize that the bonus is now required to be paid out immediately to draftees, meaning every player who earned a bonus over $100,000 will face an immediate federal income tax hit of at least 25%, with most facing 30%+ tax rates. Let’s take a look at some examples in the 2019 draft from the Baltimore Orioles.
Adley Rutschman, the top overall selection, received an $8.1 million bonus. His tax rate is the very top tax bracket would mean roughly $2.95 million of that bonus goes straight to taxes (not using any deductions, etc. for purposes of a simple calculation).
Shortstop Joseph Ortiz was drafted out of New Mexico State in the fourth round by Baltimore and given a $450,000 bonus. He would pay just less than $129,000 in taxes on that bonus, meaning he truly receives roughly $321,000.
The Orioles drafted Griffin McLarty out of College of Charleston in the eighth round and paid him $170,000 in bonus. He would have to pay a little more than $32,000 in taxes. That leaves him with $138,000 in bonus money after taxes.
Baltimore convinced big Oklahoma State right-handed Jensen Elliott to sign as a 19th-round draft pick with a $125,000 bonus. Elliott would have to pay a little more than $21,000 in federal taxes, leaving him with just over $100,000 in the end.
Lefty Dalton Stambaugh signed as a 30th round selection out of Morehead State for $50,000. He would pay a little more than $4,300 in federal taxes, leaving him with $45,700.
“Sure,” the reply comes, “but that’s still a huge chunk of change, even for the low-end. And guys lower than that get to keep all or almost all of their bonus.”
That is true that those earning a $10,000 bonus do get to keep all of it, but basically any bonus above that level would pay some federal tax. That also does not take into account any state or municipal income taxes, which would also apply.
We haven’t even really gotten into the fact that even a player moving at a consistent pace through the minor leagues without any setbacks reaches the major leagues roughly five years after being drafted. That means the money received for bonus must last those five seasons. Someone like Rutschman and even Ortiz is going to have money to spread, assuming they have no immediate bills to pay. However, someone with a $10,000 bonus spreading it over five years is only able to utilize $2,000 per year to supplement their yearly salary, and we already discussed that roughly a quarter of those drafted are receiving less bonus than $10,000!
This is really a team issue. The league is just sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong.
This response really stems from those who notice that teams have been raising their minor leaguers’ wages ahead of MLB’s announcement in the case of the Blue Jays last year or the Giants and the Cubs this year after the MLB announcement.
To put this bluntly, this is a baseball issue. One of the biggest critiques of the move of the game is not longer games or PEDs or any of those things that the commissioner’s office in New York would like you to believe. It’s the continued drift of the work of the commissioner’s office toward making MLB a business that benefits its team owners, a move that has been incredibly strong since Bud Selig took the reigns. Years of moving the control of the game from being in the hands of the owners exclusively had been corrected with free agency and players unionizing. The tragic loss of A. Bartlett Giamatti as commissioner in 1989 may have been one of the greatest losses the game could have suffered. He was a man with a pure love of the game that would not be dissuaded by either side in his decisions.
That digression aside, while minor league baseball existed in many formats for nearly a century before, in 1962, MLB created an agreement with a formal, organized, Minor League Baseball entity. This agreement set forth that MLB would provide players and coaches, while Minor League Baseball communities would provide the facilities for those teams. Major league teams would choose their affiliate, and the level of freedom with affiliate choice has led some to believe that the interaction between the majors and minors in baseball is a team-driven interaction.
In fact, the interactions are dictated by the Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA), a high-level document between the commissioner’s office for MLB and the president’s office for MiLB. MiLB has operated its own technology development company, for instance, independent from Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). Certainly, fans across the country would be able to better view minor league baseball with the full efforts of MLBAM behind broadcasts, but that is not something that MLB wanted to expand into. Choosing instead to work with multiple non-sports entities and the National Hockey League, but not Minor League Baseball when discussions on the issue were brought forth. That has left the minor league head office and various league offices to make the decisions on their development of broadcast technology.
The reasons you see major league teams now buying their own full-season affiliates have many reasons, but a big reason is to be able to sidestep PBA provisions on community control of the team. MLB teams utilize many of the same tactics to get a new stadium in the minor leagues for a team-owned affiliate that they use at the MLB level, pushing the cost of those facilities on taxpayers in the community where the affiliate is located.
Essentially, MLB is related to the pay of the minor league players in a similar way that the league is related to the pay of MLB. Just as the luxury tax dictates how teams spend on their big league team, the determined rates by MLB will strongly guide how teams spend on their minor leaguers. To not see the connection is really difficult to understand, to be honest.
These guys only play from April through September. They can earn money elsewhere in the offseason!
This argument is one often used that seems to harken back to stories of players toning their muscles in their offseason by working on ice delivery trucks or working in an oilfield where the intense labor of the work would be rewarded with significantly higher pay that would balance out that in those days, a major league ballplayer’s salary was often below that of a union factory worker without the guaranteed benefits.
In today’s society, the pay scale does not escalate for the labor-intensity of work, so the opportunity to take such jobs in the offseason to cover salary shortfall during the season is less there now. Some players do have “side hustles” that allow them to earn other money, but that’s really neither here nor there.
The increase in salary will pay a player approximately $14,000 for the season in Triple-A and approximately $5,000 for a season in short-season leagues. Currently, the poverty level in the United States is $12,760 for eligibility for federal programs such as SNAP, Section 8, and other financial assistance. That means any player from Double-A down through rookie ball would qualify for federal financial assistance based on that level, even with the increases (all levels currently qualify).
However, when someone says that “a player works six months of the year playing baseball, they should work doing something to make good money the other six months if they want to pursue that dream,” that’s an extremely ill-informed take. Zack Greinke of the Houston Astros recently showed up roughly two weeks into spring training, stating that was the last day that players HAD to show up, so he decided to wait until that day rather than be early.
Minor league players don’t get that opportunity. In fact, some teams have gone to the measure of moving their instructional workouts with select minor league players to the weeks before spring training just to ensure that prospects are at spring from the first moment camp opens. For many players, that means mid-January to early-September is their regular required time with the team. However, then a player could be encouraged to participate in the Arizona Fall League, which now takes place in September and October. That same player could be encouraged to play in a foreign winter league for more experience or to try a new position.
Even if a player is not asked to do any other active leagues in the offseason, nearly every player I talked to had an offseason program given to them by their team with expectations to check-in by either working out at team facility or sending in video of your workout a few times during the offseason. One player had timed his required workout in the offseason to average a little more than two hours per day when working out in a three days on, one day off rotation to protect his body from injury and overuse.
In all, even a player in Triple-A who does not go to offseason leagues could be looking at nine weeks of unpaid spring training time along with 21 weeks (give or take) that requires roughly 250 hours of workout time of offseason that is also unpaid. Even at $15 per hour, if that Triple-A player was able to secure a job for 40 hours that would work around his offseason workout plan, that’s $12,600, so roughly $27,000 total for the entire year before taxes.
While the players wished to remain anonymous, multiple told me that finding a job was such a hassle that it’s become passed down in some organizations to apply for federal benefits using their summer salary as their sole income so the player can focus on offseason workouts. When teams are encouraging players to focus on baseball all offseason but paying them in such a way that they are counting on food stamps and welfare in order to comply with requested offseason workout plans, the system is broken.
They get room and board, health insurance, free travel, and all kinds of amenities with their pay, and the college guys got a free education! They shouldn’t be complaining!
Portions of this have been argued in every single brush-back against increasing minor league pay that I’ve seen, and frankly, it’s really frustrating.
First, they do receive health insurance, and compared to most Americans, it’s quite good. That said, whether a player carries that health insurance into the offseason depends on his/her contract status. A player with team control that remains in the minors will still have coverage, but a team can cut a player in the offseason with no obligation to offer coverage. The worst situations are for those who have costly surgeries (elbow, knee, etc.) and have months of rehab, only to be cut and have to pay for that out of pocket. The other end of things is the insurance the players are provided typically requires that they first seek the opinion of team medical personnel before going to another physician, and that could lead to some very worrisome player health/team cost-benefit lines being crossed.
From there, the information is murky at best. I’ll go last to first on the opening question. No school has a baseball team of full-ride baseball players. It simply does not happen. Division I baseball teams are allotted a MAXIMUM of 11 2/3 scholarships (roughly half of the ~300 Division I teams are even allotted their maximum at any given time due to school allotment, suspensions, etc.) for 27 roster spots. You could give each player some level of scholarship, but the minimum a player can receive is 25% tuition, so most teams stick to a handful of full-rides and then splitting the rest out among the team. Other funding is available, but recent scholarship scandals in baseball specifically have brought extra scrutiny to the non-athletic scholarships and grants that baseball players are awarded.
I spoke with a number of players and ex-players in doing this story. Of those players, eight played college baseball at some level. One (a non-Division I athlete) had a full athletic scholarship, but he had it due to playing multiple sports for his school. He and one other player were the only two who left college and entered pro ball with no student loan debt to pay.
As far as free travel goes, ask the members of the 2015 Carolina Mudcats how luxurious that free travel is! Minor league teams are taking large passenger buses from town to town in general, not jumping on private planes or arriving in luxurious, decked-out buses. There are still a number of short-season teams that use reconditioned school buses to travel.
The room and board comments are really interesting as there is some idea that the “spread” after a minor league game is some sort of seven-course, gourmet dinner, complete with a wait staff and bar service for those of age. In general, food after the game is a glorified party sub and a bag of chips or (if you’re lucky) carrots/apples/celery. Each player is given a food allowance that is supposed to cover days when there isn’t a game and meals not eaten at the park. However, with the majority of teams, that amounts to roughly $25-50 per week of spending money outside the time with the club.
Most clubs on the road will provide for a hotel for their players in the minor leagues, but it’s certainly not a five-star! One player relayed to me that hotel assignments were such that any bed of a double or larger size had two players assigned to it on the road, so a hotel room with two full-size beds would house four players, no matter the size of the room (or the players, for that matter). In discussing hotels, one minor league team had a sponsorship with a hotel that specialized in longer-term stays on a budget, so they often had rooms that four would share that did include a microwave and a kitchenette. One player’s fondest memory of hotels was simple, “In a hotel, we got to watch cable, and I couldn’t afford cable at home, so that was a treat!”
At home, teams rarely offer accommodations. Some teams will use spring training housing during the year if their spring training facility is used by one of their affiliates, but that is only applicable to about 10 teams, and from asking around, only two or three do this for their players.
Typically, a player will either need to share an apartment or live with a host family. Host families have become a tradition in minor league baseball, even though the system is akin to foster care with many, many good-hearted people with honorable efforts being spoiled by the few that do deplorable things to players while housed in their homes. Host families often charge rent at some level to players (some $1), and most don’t receive any compensation from the teams. These host families often will assist in covering some food expenses, laundry, and other such daily living expenses as well, but it’s something to consider that we in baseball see host families as a completely normal thing.
If that was a high school student leaving home to attend college, and rather than staying in a dormitory on campus or paying for his/her apartment off-campus, the student instead got linked into a university’s expansive host family network where families were expected to care for someone else’s child by bedding them, feeding them, laundering them, and caring for them for six months of the year just to see them walk away, people would be losing their collective minds. Instead, it’s an expected and even celebrated practice in the minor leagues.
They’re choosing this dream, and any guy out there would love to do what they’re doing! How am I supposed to feel sympathy?
At least this argument has some merit. If I choose to go to into the military for the benefits of potentially traveling the world, elite training, and potential college tuition, you understand that your pay will likely be low while you are active duty.
Players understand this as well. However, there’s a difference between being on the very low end of the wage scale to chase one’s dream and being severely below the poverty line. We already examined that, even with the boosts that won’t be coming until 2021, minor league players are below the poverty line in pay.
However, as a musician and writer that’s done plenty of work to pay my own dreams, one thing that separates the minor league journey from all others, is what players have to “pay in” to the team as part of the process. Required payments from minor leaguers include clubhouse fees, uniform fees in some organizations, and purchase of equipment. One player estimated the total cost up to $100 per month when all equipment is figured in. The player did say that he got an endorsement that covered 2/3 the cost of his equipment, but not until he got to High-A ball as the company was not interested when he was at lower levels. Even at half that rate, if you’re paying $250-300 per year out of the sub-poverty level income that you’re already getting, there’s something up with that situation.
In other words, players are being charged by their clubs in order to pursue their dreams. While I respect and understand many dreams require spending plenty on outside training and equipment while taking lower salaries, for a multi-billion dollar corporation like Major League Baseball to require those players, the majority of whom will never make the majors, to pay the team to pursue their dream is incredible to me.
Minor leaguers will get paid in the end when they reach the majors, so eventually, they get theirs.
This is the one that frustrates me the most. Sure, there are players that will make the majors and get paid, this is true. However, for that guy who makes a great story because he struggled through eight or nine years in the minors before making his major league debut, how much time do you think he really spends in the major leagues?
In looking at the last three seasons of minor league baseball, roughly 4,600 players each year recorded an at-bat in minor league baseball. For those same seasons, roughly 975 recorded an at-bat in the majors. That just puts a little bit of number to it, as that doesn’t count any pitcher that did not record an official at-bat on the season for either number, but it gives a good idea of the ratio. Roughly 20-25% of the player pool size in the major leagues for the player pool in the minor leagues. That doesn’t take into account longevity of majors vs. minors, level of minors, or a number of other factors. It’s just a simplistic way to show that claiming 80% of minor league players won’t ever play in the major leagues is not outlandish to say.
There is a saying that’s been attributed to many keen organizational development people over the years, all the way to Branch Rickey himself. The saying goes that a minor league team exists for less than a handful of guys. The rest of the guys are there to play catch with that handful.
However, if they’re not paid a decent wage to be part of developing the next Mike Trout or Clayton Kershaw, why would a player stick around in the minor leagues once it’s clear that his path is most likely not that of a future star? Heck, why would a 19th round draft choice sign at all?
Minor league baseball is how so many of the players we love in the major leagues hone their skills, and the communities that the teams play in, rely on those teams for both financial and entertainment value in their community. With the simple fact that the future superstars that they’re helping to develop won’t get paid what they’re truly worth for the first half dozen years of their careers, MLB should be happy to fork over some of that savings to the players who “play catch” to develop each of those future superstars.
I could dig into the challenging comments on this for days, but I think this gives a good base. I wrote an editorial for my “day job” regarding the Astros scandal and impending Red Sox punishment that mentioned that Major League Baseball is really fighting a losing battle when it comes to negative press. However, the future of the game could handle 100 Astros scandals for any threat to the viability of minor league baseball, and what that could do to people turning away from baseball and never coming back. Beyond the MLB/MiLB scuffle, the CBA between MLB and the Players’ Union will be a challenge as well, with a strong potential for either side to walk away from the table. A lockout or a strike could have horrific effects on the health and viability of the game.
Baseball is the game you teach to your children and your grandchildren. I have incredible memories of being taught to keep score by my grandfather, on a napkin in his pickup, as we listened to a ballgame on the radio. My children are using one of my favorite entry points into the game, baseball cards, as a way for their father to pass the game to them as we open boxes together, and follow players when we watch baseball all summer, especially minor league baseball. Players at the minor league level are a huge part of the backbone of the game we all love. Continuing to find reasons to defend millionaires and billionaires while chastising guys with often-negative personal asset valuation sheets, is not where fans should be, and it’s in all of our best interests to ensure we’re informed on these issues to both support players but also to ensure the longevity of the game we all love!