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    Aron Solomon: Major League Baseball Faces Its Green Monster

    Law 4 Mins Read

    By Aron Solomon

    On Sunday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news that Major League Baseball would require teams to provide housing for Minor League players starting in 2022. While we await formal details of the league’s plan, the threshold question today is why is Major League Baseball, a league that has been so hesitant to spend the money necessary to support their Minor Leaguers, doing so now?

    While the answer might be that they realized it was finally the right time to do the right thing, a more skeptical and politically savvy analysis is that they realized they finally had no other viable option but to spend some green. With a rising wave of public and judicial discontent over major league baseball’s business practices and the league’s dangerous and antiquated antitrust exemption, Major League Baseball finds itself with their back against a monster of a wall. 

    Exactly one month ago, the nonprofit Advocates Minor Leaguers – a coalition of current and former players, wives and partners, families and fans – organized a fan appreciation day in ballparks across the country to raise awareness of the living and working conditions of minor leaguers. It was by all measures a massive success, with some major league players and managers embracing the cause by wearing the “fair ball” wristband and speaking out the day after the event. 

    There are also practical business reasons that might have led MLB to make this change. The current treatment of minor league players is a profoundly unsustainable way to produce the league’s next generation of players. 

    Imagine you’re a catcher and you’re number 5 on the Dodgers depth chart. And this is how you live during the season:

    If these are your living conditions, how well are you eating, training, and sleeping? Not very well, as evinced this season by deeply disturbing stories emerging, such as the one about Minor Leaguers drinking Nyquil at truck stops so they could sleep through a bus road trip as they didn’t have enough money to eat. 

    So from the perspective of Major League Baseball, if these players who the team hopes and expects one day to have a shot at being contributing members to the success of an MLB franchise don’t progress as the team needs them to, this jeopardizes the foundation of professional baseball’s future. 

    So while Sunday’s decision to provide Minor Leaguers housing during the season is welcome news to players and anyone who follows the game, it’s only the first of several necessary steps. Advocates for Minor Leaguers have been fighting for a living minimum salary of $15,000 and to end seasonal pay. It’s still October and Minor Leaguers won’t be paid again until April, though they will continue their training every day, as is required by their contractual obligation to their Major League team

    Next season, the Dodgers team salaries range from $34,000,000 to $575,000. If they can’t ensure that every minor leaguer earns a minimum of $15,000 per year, how is this a sustainable way to train your next generation of players and, equally importantly, how is this a business model that can keep going?

    Perhaps it can’t, and this is the potential fallout that some observers fear. Last year, Major League Baseball stripped 40 Minor League clubs of MLB affiliation, in a rescission that has since made it to the courts. 

    While fair treatment for Minor Leaguers is simply the more equitable sharing of a truly robust economic pie enjoyed by Major League Baseball, some fear that the league could rethink their overall approach to developmental baseball. If this happens and there is further Minor League rescission, towns and cities across the nation could be deeply impacted. For some towns, a Minor League Baseball team is a major employer. It brings net new inside and outside dollars to the community even aside from the amazing intangibles, such as a sense of community pride, that having a Minor League team brings to town. There are far too many examples of towns such as Hagerstown, Maryland, where losing their Minor League team brought an economic downturn through the loss of baseball-related revenue streams. 

    How this plays out over the off-season is going to be the number one story to watch in baseball. For those of us who closely observe the Supreme Court, any further allusions to Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption, as they recently made in Alston, will be further indicators of the waning lifespan of the antitrust exemption and the absurd Save America’s Pastime Act, which is the legal foundation on which MLB currently relies not to pay their Minor Leaguers.

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