Improved conditions for minor league players in spite of poor legislation
The Toronto Blue Jays’ 2021 season ended with a curveball, some thirty minutes after the team secured its 91st and final win of the year. The pitch clinched the last playoff spot for the Boston Red Sox, only one win ahead of Canada’s team.
For the Blue Jays’ minor league players, Toronto’s elimination from contention also formally punctuated another chapter in their fledgling yet fleeting playing careers. The winter will mark the end of some players’ journeys, the clock expiring on their major league dreams. For others, the frost is an apt form of pathetic fallacy for the hardships they will encounter in the off-season.
Baseball minor leaguers are not paid during the seven months of the off-season, yet their respective major league teams expect the players to continue to train and dedicate themselves to baseball-related activities to further their development. Unfortunately, without pay or benefits, reality expects the players to seek part-time jobs (often multiple) just to have another chance at a major league career starting next spring.
Even with a recent increase to the minimum salary, most minor league players are paid below $15,000 USD for five months of the season and nothing for the remaining seven. In fact, with the exception of Triple-A players (those at the highest level of the minor league baseball system) whose minimum salary is roughly $14,000 USD in 2021, other minor league tiers’ minimum salaries are below the U.S. poverty line of $12,760 USD.
While this level of exploitation demands legislative intervention in line with the most basic labour and employment statutes, this situation is ironically enabled by legislation. The lineage of this inequality can be traced back to a 1922 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Federal Baseball Club v National League, where the court held that the Sherman Antitrust Act did not apply to Major League Baseball (MLB), thereby granting an antitrust exemption that lasted for over 75 years. Notably, such an exemption was never granted to any other sporting organization.
Although the Curt Flood Act of 1998, named after the player considered to be the pioneer of the free agency system in baseball, revoked MLB’s antitrust exemption, the legislation did not apply to the minor leagues. After years—and millions of dollars—of lobbying by MLB, the U.S. Senate passed the comically-named “Save America’s Pastime Act,” which itself was buried in an 891-page $1.3 trillion USD spending bill, in 2018.
The Save America’s Pastime Act reads as follows: “any employee employed to play baseball who is compensated pursuant to a contract that provides for a weekly salary for services performed during the league’s championship season (but not spring training or the off season) at a rate that is not less than a weekly salary equal to the minimum wage under section 6(a) for a workweek of 40 hours, irrespective of the number of hours the employee devotes to baseball related activities” (emphasis added). This ensured that minor league players would not be entitled to year-round pay regardless of their full-year dedication. Minimum wage for five months of a season is, unsurprisingly, well below minimum wage considering that a year is 12 months long.
While the past has been full of gloom, the present shows signs of positive change for the future. In 2019, the Toronto Blue Jays raised salaries for their minor league players by roughly 50 percent above the minimum wage floor. To the public’s knowledge, no other team responded to the Blue Jays’ decision by raising their minor league salaries above minimum wage. However, just two seasons later, MLB imposed salary increases between 38-72 percent for the 2021 season across all organizations.
More promisingly, minor leaguers now have a pseudo-union to advocate for their interests. The Advocates for Minor Leaguers, established in 2020, will likely help to counteract the historic power imbalance between MLB and minor league players. In just 18 months since its creation, the Advocate for Minor Leaguers already had their first monumental victory—in mid-October, MLB announced that all major league teams will provide housing to “certain minor league players … for the 2022 season,” alleviating a massive cost burden on players. While the full policy is yet to be finalized, this is a welcome change.
The Advocates for Minor Leaguers’ next battle will be for year-round pay, and the wheels are already set in motion. Minor league players have been wearing “#FairBall” wristbands in-game to publicly protest the conditions to which they have been subjected.
To their credit, the Blue Jays seem to be set on proactively improving conditions for their minor league players. The team’s president and CEO, Mark Shapiro, promised that the organization was considering “every possible way to support our minor league players to be the best they can be, mentally, physically, and fundamentally.”
For a team that fielded the youngest group of batters in 2020 and the third-youngest in 2021, Toronto has shown an understanding that improving minor league conditions doesn’t just make ethical sense—it makes business sense. Since the Blue Jays’ decision to raise minor league pay in 2019, it has recorded winning percentages of .414 in 2019, .533 in 2020, and .562 in 2021.
Regardless of what legislation may allow, teams should ensure that the futures of their organization are set up for success. Baseball players face plenty of curveballs from opposing pitchers, but they shouldn’t have to face them from their own teams.
