Reflections on the Revolution in Minor League Labor Relations
Just 14 hours before the start of the MLB regular season, the league and the MLBPA reached a tentative agreement on the first collective bargaining agreement for minor league baseball players. They could have picked a day when the baseball headlines weren’t as crowded, but when it comes to making labor history, there’s no time like the present.
The headline figures include massive increases in the minimum salary across all levels and reforms in most of the areas that have made minor league baseball’s working conditions a target for criticism. All that just seven months after minor league ballplayers announced their intent to unionize.
At the moment, all the two sides have is a tentative agreement, which is essentially a handshake deal on a set of terms that both negotiating teams will take back to their full constituencies for a vote. The vote itself is normally (but not always) a formality if the respective bargaining teams recommend it. That process could be complete, and the CBA finalized, as soon as this weekend.
For a comprehensive breakdown of what’s going to change, see the work of Jeff Passan at ESPN and Evan Drellich at The Athletic, both of whom have been on this story from the start. Rather than analyze every single bullet point, I want to pick out some of the highlights and reflect on how completely and rapidly the minor league landscape has changed over the past few years.
Let’s start with the money, an estimated $90 million in guaranteed salary increases across the various levels:
| Level | Then | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Complex | $4,800 | $19,800 |
| Single-A | $11,000 | $26,200 |
| High-A | $11,000 | $27,300 |
| Double-A | $13,800 | $30,250 |
| Triple-A | $17,500 | $35,800 |
Players, who were previously paid only during the season, will now receive checks during spring training and most of the offseason, including four weeks’ back pay for this year’s spring training. No ballplayer is going to get rich off the minor league minimum salary. It’d be difficult, if not impossible, to raise a family on any of these minimum salaries, and even for a single man living in league-subsidized housing, $19,800 only just gets you to the bottom of a living wage in places like Florida and Arizona. Baseball will still pay its minor leaguers less than basketball, where G-Leaguers make a minimum of $40,500 a year. In hockey, ECHL players make a minimum of $510 a week, while the AHL minimum is upwards of $50,000 a year.
But consider that minor league hockey players have been unionized since 1967 — major league baseball didn’t even have divisions back then — and minor league baseball players made these gains in one offseason, in their first CBA. It’s huge progress.
Another economic gain for the players is the reacquisition of their name, image, and likeness rights, which had previously been held by the league. Getting these rights was a big enough deal for college athletes that most sports fans know what NIL stands for offhand now. This will probably end up being an afterthought in terms of most players’ wallets. But until the minor leaguers unionized, the league was not only paying them poverty wages, it also restricted their ability to market themselves. That’s a particularly odious double-barreled message of: You’re not valuable enough to deserve a living wage, but also you’re so valuable capital must extract profit not just from your labor but from your name and physical appearance.
Among other improvements to housing and transportation subsidies, players living in team-subsidized housing in the top two levels of the minors will have their own bedrooms. (Anyone who was ever a teenager and has younger siblings knows what a big deal this is.) Players will also have a say in the composition of clubhouse meals through a joint clubhouse nutrition committee. And for the first time, minor leaguers will have the benefit of codified workplace policies the MLBPA won so long ago they’re taken for granted in the majors: the right to a second medical opinion, codified policies on drugs and domestic violence, and a grievance process.
Under this five-year agreement, life in the minor leagues will be hard. The pay won’t be very good, the job security minimal as the sport, by its very structure, continues to cull and eat its own young. But it will be, by orders of magnitude, easier and healthier than it was five years ago. In the hours after the TA was reached, minor league pitcher-turned-attorney Garrett Broshuis posted a tweet thread reflecting on the deal. If you’ve read anything at all on the subject this week you’ve probably seen it, but the particulars are worth revisiting.
Because it’s easy to forget about minor leaguers cramming an entire starting rotation into a two-bedroom apartment on air mattresses, sleeping in cars and closets because they couldn’t afford housing, being unable to afford food. Life will be hard in the minors going forward, but it will be livable in ways players of Broshuis’ generation could scarcely have imagined.
So what’s the catch?
The big concession on the union’s part was agreeing to cut the in-season reserve list from 180 to 165 players. The reserve list comprises all rostered minor league players outside of the complexes in the Dominican Republic, so these cuts basically reduce the number of minor league jobs by about 8%.
That’s not something to be glossed over. With fewer minor league roster spots, teams won’t have the luxury of waiting on late bloomers to develop in their early 20s. Some of the players who fall through the cracks will end up getting their chance in college or indy ball, but that’s not an option for everyone, particularly players coming from overseas.
Reducing the size of the minor leagues has been a matter of ardent urgency for the league for years, most notably in late 2020 when MLB cut a quarter of its affiliated minor league teams. The league sought to cut the reserve list further during the lockout, but the union resisted.
In a healthy economic and cultural environment, the league and its cartel of owners would treat baseball as the end and profit the means. An argument on the grounds of the health of the sport would be persuasive: Fewer minor league jobs means lost opportunities for would-be stars, even if they are few in number. Fewer minor league teams means fewer opportunities for fans (or potential fans) to see accessible, affordable high-level baseball in person.
That’s not the environment we inhabit, however, and so those arguments are not persuasive. If you’re looking for an entity with power, or at least a seat at the table, that’s looking out for the game itself, your search will go unrewarded.
Corporate avarice is at the root of so much that ails the game, from minor league poverty to tanking to high ticket prices to byzantine and expensive TV bundles. And an easy, but fallacious, logical leap follows: that the most powerful organization that stands in opposition to the league — the union — must fight back on all fronts. But the union’s purview is limited to the interests of its own members, and its power is limited to the ability to leverage public opinion against a well-resourced and shameless adversary.
Winning historic pay increases for minor leaguers, and incorporating the interests of overseas workers outside the jurisdiction of American labor law, and fighting corruption in international player recruitment, and not only stemming the tide against the owners’ devout desire to gut the minors, but reversing the cuts they made unilaterally… that’s not something any union is capable of doing. For that, you’d need a genie. No, wait, that list has four things on it and a genie only gives you three wishes.
And even on the front of minor league reduction, this compromise is hardly a capitulation. MLB has been cutting minor league players and teams unilaterally for years. MLB sought the ability to unilaterally determine the size of the minor leagues, but the union negotiated not only a firm number on the reserve list for the life of the CBA, but also got a guarantee from MLB that there would be no further minor league contraction for the next five years.
Those five years will be calmer and more pleasant for all parties than the five that just passed, but the conflict is far from over. The struggle between labor and capital is, well, I remember some guy saying something to the effect of that struggle constituting the history of all hitherto existing society. I swear I read that somewhere.
But for the first time ever, labor has established a beachhead worth defending in this corner of the industry. And as important as it is to remember what gains are left to be won, and what pitfalls must be avoided, it’s equally important to understand how much progress has been made, against such resolute opposition, in so little time.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
I saw those numbers and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. This is an enormous win for minor league players. This goes from “not being able to survive” to “being able to survive” levels of money. Most players are still probably poor by any reasonable definition, even with minor league housing and whatnot, but it’s basically impossible to even eat properly on 11K a year much less do anything else. At $25K, at least you have a chance.
(On a personal note, I remember earning 20K or less and how miserable it was, but that was a super long time ago…costs are so much higher now. I can’t imagine how I would do it today with prices being higher)
agreed, this is a massive win and a huge step in the right direction for the MiLPA and people in general. to more than double the salaries for thousands of people is just mind bogglingly wonderful.
Well, they did it in part by cutting their workforce by 10%. But yeah, overall still a wonderful outcome.
Including in that that 10% is professionally better off trying something else amyway. If the Dream! means that personally much to you, fine, there’s still Indy ball, the Mexican league, overseas, plenty of other places in which you get the opportunity to prove yourself.
As to the article itself: Just great. Meg/Appleman have found themselves yet another acolyte of Karl Marx to write Fangraphs screeds against the EVILS OF INTERNATIONAL CAPITALISM!!! Just ‘yeesh’.
some things are just inherently evil. why would anyone be extolling the virtues of capitalism instead?
If it wasn’t for “capitalism”, you and 98% of the world’s population would still be subsistence farmers. In the last 30 years, capitalism has lifted literally BILLIONS of people out of abject poverty.
perhaps this is true historically, but in its current state it is a system of exploitation. also, nothing inherently wrong with being subsistence farmers!
What are you smoking? Pretty much everything we have in modern society – including baseball – wouldn’t exist if we were all still subsistence farmers.
back to the primitive, man
this argument sucks. so since we have baseball, capitalism is good? capitalism also helped keep slavery going for much longer than it “should have” (which is obviously never), and american capitalism uniquely and systemically aids in the oppression of many groups of people.
Southerners actually used anti-capitalist language to defend slavery as a positive good, in contrast to the treatment of mill workers in the northeast.
Emancipation dramatically increased plantation profits while cutting costs.
Hope the downvoters understand that I’m saying slavers were sick fucks who prioritized owning other human beings as chattel over making money.
Chattel slavery in the New World was never about maximizing profits. It was only ever about racism and power.
Hell, it was codified in order to destroy class consciousness among the Wild Bachelors.
The history of slavery has very little to do with the concept of capitalism itself. In fact, the slave-free northern states generally had better economies than the slave states. While that’s mostly because they had better industries, but it wasn’t slave labor that allowed them to setup those industries, and even northern farmers could get by without slaves.
Meanwhile, American capitalism systematically aids in the oppresion of much fewer people than every other kind of economic policy currently in use. If you seriously think economics are bad here, you know nothing about living in places like China, Venezuela, Cuba, Afghanistan, or worst of all, North Korea.
Modern American crony capitalism sucks, and leads to less competition and worse outcomes (including in terms of innovation) than you’ll see in countries with robust social safety nets.
To some degree, maybe, but there are simply no better options as long as you have proper regulations.
You’re confusing capitalism with Communism (which is not to be confused with socialism, which most modern countries like the U.S. also practice to a minor degree). The only kind of capitalism that is inherently evil is completely unregulated capitalism. When a capitalist economy is properly regulated and balanced by a decent (but not overblown) amount of socialism, it’s an economic policy that’s about as good as it can reasonably get despite still being far from perfect.
Any mention of labor arrangements whatsoever is automatic Marxism to Americans.
Your perfectly welcome to make the owners’ case for them if you wish. We’re all eyes.
Prior to unionizing, the owners cut all advanced-Rookie and short-season-A teams from their payrolls with no recourse for the players. As a union, they can at least get something in return and limit/delay the number of cuts.
Paying minor leaguers enough that they can eat well and providing subsidies for housing seems like a no brainer simply from a development standpoint. A kid who is living in his car eating nothing but Taco Bell is going to have a harder time unlocking his physical potential than someone sleeping on a real bed and eating decent food.
That said, it’s hard to feel too sorry for players once they have enough for basic needs. These are entry level positions with the possibility of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. (And yes, I’ve done the “living on a pittance” thing in grad school. It was fine. I was young.)
Yeah – living on $20,000 isn’t fun, but it’s doable.
They’re doing a competitive apprenticeship, with the opportunity to eventually make a truly crazy amount of money. A relatively low salary is reasonable.
Living on $11,000 a year, though, isn’t doable.
I don’t know if it is fine anymore, with inflation over the last few decades. I’m guessing 20K is rather borderline for “basic needs”.
Maybe the housing provision makes a big difference, but I am still confident these salaries put them as being “poor”. I think the main point is…these salary numbers at least give you a fighting chance.
The other thing is the NIL $$. Not sure how much minor league players will make off it & it will most likely be the better known prospects that do, but, there is some room to make some extra $$..even if it’s $5-10K to promote some local business, that’s $5-10K more then they had last year.
The housing provision will make a big difference at the higher levels which have more teams in larger (costlier) communities.
Before getting too carried away over the salaries, folks should remember it isn’t take home, but rather gross. Before taxes, inflation, and other obligations.
A big improvement but nowhere near easy street, particularly for players with families.
If something is good “from a development standpoint”, what does “[feeling] sorry for players” have to do with the issue?
There’s a tiny amount of “but there’s subsidized housing, etc.” So, like the military or being a grad student, it may or may not be as terrible as the headline number.
In a lot of ways it really is like being a grad student – small salary that you can’t really live in, going into debt or forgoing income in the hope of a job that you probably won’t be able to get, because it’s a tournament and there’s always more hopefuls than jobs.
The upside if you land the job is a lot higher than a research professor job, I suppose, at least if money is the ultimate goal. Tournament-style job markets can be pretty nasty. (Occasionally schools get out of criticism because as long as you call it education, some people think it’s more virtuous than a job that pays slightly more while you earn work experience but is called a job. Other people criticize the educational system just as much.)
I wonder if at some point someone will suggest an absurdly rococo student-loan type system for minor league players, to be forgiven if they don’t make the major leagues. Would be absurd and silly, but not any sillier than grad school.
There are already companies that will pay minor leaguers a guaranteed amount of money in exchange for a percentage of their MLB salary (Fernando Tatis Jr. did something like this), but they don’t have to pay it back if they don’t make the majors.
Whatever company he signed w seems like they made out OK, then
They might have been eligible for Food Stamps if they weren’t moonlighting during the off-season, though.
It’s just another example of ownership myopia, and why baseball is on a path to becoming what NASCAR is now. There isn’t the bottom-up emphasis on participation from cradle to grave that basketball has in the US, ice hockey has in Canada, soccer has in Europe and South America and cricket has in South Asia.
There is to a large extent in the Dominican Republic. The MLB academies are a closer thing to how European soccer works (including the corruption, and honestly less player rights than the US.)
I don’t know if I want baseball to be like how soccer academies work in general, but the comments about “incorporating the interests of overseas workers outside the jurisdiction of American labor law, and fighting corruption in international player recruitment,” make it sound like people and the union want baseball recruitment to be less like European soccer, not more.
I don’t think that European soccer recruitment is very much like Canadian ice hockey or US basketball recruitment. Baseball at a young age in the US isn’t that different than the North American youth sport experience in hockey, basketball, or soccer, with all the travel teams and expenses and so forth.
Does a “bottom-up emphasis on participation” mean just people being more interested in the sport, however, that’s done, or are you particularly recommending one structural model vs the other? (And, as said, the existing US youth baseball structure isn’t that different from other North American youth sports, so it really wouldn’t be a change.)
I mean every kid in Brazil of all economic strata love soccer, play soccer and live soccer to some degree, independent of organised youth sports. England has 7000 teams in the pyramid with EPL at the top. Every pub in England has a soccer team. The less MLB promotes that culture the less relevant MLB becomes.
In European soccer a player is treated like any regular employee. You sign a contract and if you are 18 and very good you will immediately get a very good wage. The players have the power not the teams.
If you’re very good at baseball at 18, you also will get paid by being drafted high. 1st rounders get millions, 2nd rounders get about $1M, 3rd-4th rounders get $500K or so. That needs to be considered ,at least for those players. Top Int’l guys get millions, too.
The guys that get screwed are late round draft picks & lower rated foreign guys. Both get virtually nothing up front AND until they make MLB. Maybe NIL will help some of the late bloomers.
Ironically, NIL has also gotten good 18-20 year old b’ball & football players paid. Seeing QB’s getting 7 figure deals, good college b’bll players making $250-750K. For some guys that aren’t good enough to make the NFL/NBA, they can cash in over $1M or more in 4-5 years. Nice start to life.
Teams feel that they are much better at identifying talent these days and as a result don’t need to have quite so many players toiling at the minor league level in order to identify viable major league talent. It’s hard to argue that that is not true, at least to some degree. While it’s always fun to see a guy debut in the bigs at age 30 the vast majority of these type of players never become more than fringe major leaguers. The overall product isn’t going to suffer if there are fewer of these because of smaller minor league rosters.
Ok but if fewer people care about baseball, to whom does the skill level of MLB players matter?
Smart teams were adding minor league teams until the Luhnow plan gutted them with a machete, because younger guys out of LatAm need game reps.
The Yankees and Rays were really aggressive on this, IIRC.
That could have been expanded massively before it was nipped in the bud. Not only does MLB not promote the game at all levels, it won’t let teams do it either
Correct.
Statistical analysis serves many interests.
A couple years ago SABR did a round by round study on the percent of drafted players that reached the majors and how many played 3 years.
https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-chances-of-a-drafted-baseball-player-making-the-major-leagues-a-quantitative-study/
Two out of every first rounders get to the bigs, half play three years.
It goes down from there.
I wish they’d included the percentage that played enough to earn a full pension
Like it or not, when MLB reduces minor league teams and rostered minor leaguers they are following the odds that say the players they are cutting are more likely “organization players” than “late blooming stars”. They’ll miss out on a few players but in their “business is business” world there is no shortage of dreamers waiting to try out and some of those *will* pan out. Impact on *their* business is minimal. (Note that when they triaged the minors, it was the MiLB team owners that screamed loudest. They were capitalists too.)
Numbers aren’t just for estimating WAR or FA salaries. Projection systems can also project a player’s career path, which doesn’t always end well. Baseball is a competitive business and in competitions there are more almost-winners than happily ever afters. A lot like life.
Is the reserve list limit that was cut a number that each team had toreach or a maximum? If it was a max does anyone know how manyplayers each teamwas carrying last year?
It was a maximum (180 in season not counting certain injured players, 190 in the offseason), and as far as I know there was nothing stopping teams from carrying less than if they wanted to. Pretty sure the teams wanting a further reduction are the ones who don’t want to pay as much for minor leaguers but are afraid if they carry fewer players than their competitors will be at an advantage. It’s trying to force everyone else to be on their level.
I’m somewhat hopeful that there will be enough pushback from teams who don’t want further cuts that it won’t go into effect (I don’t believe there is an agreement *to* cut the rosters to 165 so much as MLB has the right to cut them if they choose).
@reyrh, the 180 player in-season figure was a max. The reserve roster limits (which are different from an “active” roster limit) were just like in mlb. MLB has a 40 man reserve (26 man active) limit. AAA 38, AA 37, A+/A/RK 35. Beginning next year each team will have to cut 15 down to 165. Hasn’t been reported yet but in all likelihood all 5 reserve limits will be reduced by 3. Additionally, the current reserve list for the DSL is 35 (70 if you have 2 teams). —These minor league reserve rosters are almost never released to the public, but each team has access to them.
As to your second question, virtually every team was at the max during in-season 2022. Every time they added someone, then someone else got cut.
This really is the best news in baseball this year.
LOL.
If one replaces “baseball as the end” with “franchise values as the end” it works for completely self-interested actors
Completely true, and yet to realize it, those self-interested actors would have to be long-term rational planners. Which, to say the least and while assiduously attempting to avoid the dumb-as-shit arguments upthread, does not appear currently to be the typical approach of this, or most other, sectors of American capital.
“Franchise value” as the is an old paradigm that may not hold universally anymore. It relies on there being a greater fool willing to overpay for the prestige of team ownership and current owners believing in deferred reward thinking. Neither is assured.
Most owners today see recurring present value as more important than future value. They expect profit if not annually, at least within a handful of years. Extended deficit spending is not their preferred MO.
Yeah, I also think the owners are being shortsighted about this—even if you think of a profit motive 30 years in the future—but I’m not sure there’s any way the author’s vision is going to happen. It kind of a “what if, instead of who they are, the owners were their complete opposite?”
I was curious about that too. Are we saying that a healthier society would treat professional sports as some sort of non-profit public good like parks or playgrounds?
I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree, still trying to wrap my mind around it! 🙂
I love baseball but personally I think parks and playgrounds and libraries should probably be the priority of governments and not major sports leagues.
Think it’s more about running it like the Padres and Braves do.
Owners make their money, but it’s not about min-maxing profits at the expense of everything else.
Are you sure they aren’t maximizing returns?
There’s 30 teams in 26 markets and each one has a different competitive window, revenue stream, and liabilities. To say nothing of strategy.
The Braves seem to be pretty careful who they extend and how they do it. Those contracts save them money they can allocate elsewhere.
And if you look at SD they might be looking at extending their audience globally. MLB is starting to look seriosly at streaming revenue potential. They may want to be early beneficiaries of team by team subscriptions.
Also the numbers look big today but inflation isn’t stopping tomorrow. In five years their payroll might be middle of the pack again.
This is miles better than what they had, but anyone who thinks it’s a ‘good deal’ is misinformed.
If you’re only willing to pay an employee $35k/year, said employee should be able to give reasonable notice and become a free agent if he can find a better offer.
I would say it’s a ‘good deal’ in the sense that they got major improvements to their players’ situations.
Not all genies are beholden to the 3 wishes rule. In some stories, including the original tales of “Aladdin,” the genies grant unlimited wishes, although some may have significant limits on what kinds of wishes can be granted, while others may do everything they can to screw up your wishes if they don’t like you.
Pretty crazy this article has 44 comments and not one person has mentioned that almost every single one of these players got a signing bonus, some of them gigantic, a lot of them six figures at minimum. For some enlightenment, go look at your teams’ top ten prospects and their signing bonuses… here’s mine:
1. $2.9 million
2. $2.1 million
3.$1.1 million
4. $700,000
5. $300,000
6. $3.5 million
7. $3.2 million
8. $2.75 million
9. $200,000
10. $2 million
Not exactly sweatshop workers, and a couple of these are international signings too.
What these rules did was give these rich young men raises over the last three years while eliminating 30% of the available opportunities for guys who were willing to play almost for free to chase life changing money doing something they love. Most of the guys who were the worst off were college graduates. And the other guys being exploited the most (the Latin American players) are exempt from this new agreement until they come to the states.
And get your money up front, always, if available. Half of the top 10 guys probably wont see more than a cup of coffee in MLB, yet already have a huge leg up in life at the age of 16-22 years old.
Yes, some of these guys received big time bonuses. However, virtually every player taken past the 10th round signs for 5-125K$ out of the draft. You might argue that these are the guys who have little chance to make the bigs, and I would agree, however these players are needed to round out the rosters for the big bonus babies to advance enough to make the bigs.
See below. Your range is wrong, as one guy in round 11 got $1.5 million, and literally 1 guy in rounds 11-20 got $5k. But almost everyone got $100k or more in the last 10 rounds as well.
There are some really low bonuses in rounds 9-10, but that’s just really bad business. Once they draft you in those rounds they either sign you or lose the bonus assigned to the pick. No way in hell I am signing for $5k with that kind of leverage.
No, not almost everyone got 100K or more in the last 10 rounds.
Link below, see for yourself.
Decided to do it myself… 48 guys didnt get $100k in last 10 rounds of draft. Another 51 didnt sign. So out of 249 signed guys in last 10 rounds, 81% got $100k or more.
So… almost everyone.
I’m happy to explain why no one’s mentioned that tiny subset of MiLB players:
It’s because they’re completely fucking irrelevant to the discussion.
You’re welcome!
Okay, let’s go a little deeper to flush out the “tiny subset”. In the 11th round of the 2022 MLB draft every single signed pick got $100k or more. 12th round one guy got less… at $97,500. The vast majority of drafted players through 20 rounds of the draft (that would be around 500 minor leaguers for this year) got at least a 6 figure bonus, and this will happen again this year. These numbers also dont include the international signings, which increases the number of $100k+ players added to the system. If all the players the MLB teams feel have a chance to be MLB players are “irrelevant”, what in the hell are the minor leagues for?
https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/draft/2022/
You are fighting for raises for guys who have almost no shot to produce value for MLB teams that pay them to do so, and the teams will continue to do the obvious move as pay increases for these guys… just get rid of them. Again, 30% contraction of MiLB roster spots already. I would prefer to let 23 year adult men, most of whom are college graduates (the guys with no college eligibility left are the ones signed as minor league free agents or get really low signing bonuses), make the decision themselves if they think its’ worth it or not. This isnt a job at McDonald’s or a warehouse where people are being exploited, the payoff is huge and guys love what they are doing.
So they’ve already cut nearly a quarter of MiLB teams, plus nearly 10% of reserve rosters.. I worry that this will come with further contraction of MiLB. Wouldn’t surprise me if they further consolidated by getting rid of the short season complex leagues or something and just have the DSL, plus A/A+/AA/AAA. That’s another ~30 or so jobs that I could see getting cut. As shortsighted as cutting teams out of the MiLB was, I’m not optimistic that they’ll look at what is in the best interest in players over cutting costs.
Obviously increasing pay is a good thing, but I’m worried that it’ll come with further contraction.. We’ll see.
I get that it’s a business and any expenses for the minor leagues comes right off the bottom line, so ownership is reluctant to spend.
But it seems like there’s so much room for competitive advantage by supplying minor leaguers with good nutrition, a good night’s sleep, and the opportunity to work on baseball not income generation in the off-season. As well, being a franchise that takes care of its minor leaguers — say slightly nicer apartments and home and hotels on the road and better food — seems the best way to attract undrafted players and minor league free agents.
Do those salaries come with annual COLAs?
If not, in five years they’ll be living on the edge at best.