MLB argues minor leaguers are 'trainees' and shouldn't be paid for spring training

MLB is fighting a labor war on two fronts. Kind of impressive, really.

Late last night, The Athletic’s Evan Drellich reported on yet another sad chapter in Major League Baseball’s war against Minor League Baseball players. Per Drellich, a lawyer arguing on behalf of MLB said that minor leaguers shouldn’t be considered employees; they should be considered “trainees.”

The lawyer, Elise Bloom, is being paid $775 per hour by the league. In federal court on Friday, she said minor league players receive $2,200 per week in value from their teams during spring training – based on what kids and amateur players pay for training – and as such, should not be paid for their mandatory attendance each February and March. She said that players “had the opportunity to develop their language skills,” and cited development of communication, leadership, discipline, and time management skills as well. This is the baseball version of thinking artists should be thankful for getting paid in “exposure.”

MLB is the defendant in a class action lawsuit brought by former minor leaguers Aaron Senne, Michael Liberto, and Oliver Odle in 2014, who allege the league violated state and federal minimum wage laws. The league has gone heavy on the offensive since, lobbying Congress to amend language in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The lobbying effort paid off in 2018 with a provision packed into a 2,232-page spending bill that reclassified minor league players as seasonal workers and thus not entitled to worker protections like a minimum wage and overtime pay.

That legislative victory wasn’t enough for MLB, however. Commissioner Rob Manfred was ultimately successful in his effort to shrink Minor League Baseball, eliminating 42 of 162 teams (26%) – mostly rookie ball and Single-A teams. Many teams that were eschewed reorganized into independent league teams, and various independent leagues were reorganized into “MLB Partner Leagues.” Manfred and MLB received a ton of pushback on that effort, including from Congress, which has otherwise had the league’s back.

MLB tried to balance everything out by raising the minimum salary for minor leaguers beginning in 2021. Of course, they paid for that with the thousands of jobs cut by shrinking the league. Additionally, back in October, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that MLB is expected to require teams to provide housing for minor league players in 2022. Again, this money isn’t coming out of ownership wallets; it’s covered by the thousands of players, coaches, and stadium personnel who were given pink slips during the Great Contraction. Even with the relatively significant raises, minor league players are still vastly underpaid, and they don’t have a union to fight on their behalf like their major league counterparts.

The league is currently in the middle of a lockout with major league players, as the most recent collective bargaining agreement expired on December 1, and the two sides were unable to come to an agreement on a new one in time. For those of you who are new to labor strife, a lockout is different than a strike as it’s enforced by the owners in order to put pressure on labor to make concessions. A strike is when the workers walk out on the job in order to put pressure on the owners to make concessions. Thus, a lockout and a strike are opposites. The minor league issues blaring in the background of major league CBA negotiations is certainly an interesting soundtrack.

To briefly summarize the key issues the players want to see addressed in the new CBA: they want to minimize service time manipulation, they want to do away with attaching draft pick compensation to free agents, they want the minimum salary increased, they want players to be able to become eligible for arbitration sooner, and they want to remove some of the incentives teams are using in order to tank. The union and the owners are so far apart that Manfred requested assistance from a federal mediator. (The players had to agree to use a mediator and they, understandably, rejected the idea.) While not an uncommon tactic, it is indicative of the chasm that will likely eat into spring training and may cause a delay to the start of the regular season.

Manfred further provided a galvanizing moment for the union at the conclusion of the owners meetings in Florida on Thursday. The commissioner compared owning a MLB team to owning stocks, saying, “If you look at the purchase price of franchises, the cash that's put in during the period of ownership and then what they've sold for, historically, the return on those investments is below what you'd get in the stock market, what you'd expect to get in the stock market, with a lot more risk.”

Why does that matter? Why does one have to outperform the U.S. stock market in order to view owning a team as a viable business venture? It isn’t enough to have billions of dollars and to accomplish a childhood dream of being in complete control of a baseball team? Getting good baseball players and putting an entertaining product on the field for fans isn’t enough? Every single baseball team is worth at least $1 billion, save the Marlins, who are just shy at $990 million, per Forbes. Every owner who has sold a team in recent memory has made much more than their money back. It’s not enough.

That was a lot to get through and I promise I’m going somewhere with it. MLB is making money hand over fist, setting a record with $10.7 billion in revenues in 2019. The league saw a reported $3 billion in revenues in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and we await the 2021 figures, which will likely be back in the $9-10 billion range. Player salaries haven’t grown with MLB’s profits, reaching $4.25 billion in 2017 before declining to $4.23 billion in ‘18, $4.22 billion in ‘19, and $4.05 billion this past season.

In the abstract, teams are less interested in paying players – in putting together a good, entertaining product on the field – than ever, at least since the advent of the MLBPA. The union, in fact, has filed grievances against four teams for this exact issue. That’s because the players aren’t the biggest drivers of revenue anymore. Broadcasting deals are where the real money is. The league currently receives $550 million annually from ESPN, ~$729 million from FOX, and $470 million from TBS. Apple is also reportedly interested in broadcasting midweek MLB games. And, of course, there’s MLB’s own streaming service, MLB.tv.

If the owners could get away with it, they’d put a bunch of nameless, faceless players on the field in an empty stadium, pay them the lowest they could legally get away with, and find a way to get you to pay to watch it. Labor is costly. Players cost money. Coaches cost money. Front office staff costs money. PA announcers, concession workers, ushers, custodians, cooks, security – they all cost money. Like a river only flows in one direction, the stream of business in a capitalist economy flows towards minimizing labor costs to increase profits.

As the sport has been infiltrated by quants, thanks in large part to the Moneyball/Sabermetrics epoch, optimization has been the sole goal for most of the league. For example, scouts have been a casualty of this kind of optimization in recent years, as Jim Alexander of the Orange County Register pointed out last summer. Teams with hundreds of millions of dollars to play with are trying to be Billy Beane at the helm of the 2002 Oakland Athletics. In their eyes, scouts are Jason Giambi; a database (and some nerd fresh out of Yale) is Scott Hatteberg.

Minor League Baseball lost 42 teams. Eventually, there will be no Minor League Baseball at all. There will be no spring training. Players are increasingly training independently with the likes of Driveline Baseball. Bloom let on more than she likely knew when she said that the league is providing $2,200 per week by allowing minor leaguers to participate in spring training. What if players had to be in charge of their own instruction, of molding themselves into major leaguers? That could save MLB money!

The league’s chicanery in recent years will certainly have a ripple effect. Kids will be less motivated to pursue their dream of playing baseball because it’s not realistic. With fewer teams, it will be even harder to make it onto a minor league team and stay there. The league isn’t making it appealing to trudge it through the minors with lagging pay, substandard work environments, and scant worker protections. Most minor league players never make it to the majors anyway. It’s much more appealing to play a different sport; it’s partially why Kyler Murray chose to play football over baseball.

Skill is relative. The talent pool will become shallower and shallower in the coming years, but you’ll still technically be watching the best players in the country and the league can market accordingly. MLB has a legal monopoly on the sport in the U.S. Most MLB fans don’t watch, for example, Nippon Professional Baseball. And sure, you can go watch the NFL or NBA instead, or you can fill up your entertainment hours with Netflix and Hulu and Twitch and TikTok. If you want U.S. baseball, however, you have nowhere to turn but Major League Baseball, wherever they happen to be. Slashing and eventually eliminating the minors is a horrible long-term play, but the owners don’t care since they don’t plan to be around when shit hits the fan. They’ll flip the team for a massive profit whenever the algorithms tell them to hit the eject button. Thanks, suckers; enjoy your stripped-down baseball!

That’s why it’s so important for the MLB Players Association to score a win on behalf of the players in the ongoing CBA negotiations. If we’re being realistic, the owners have a tremendous amount of leverage. Ironically, the players’ leverage is the owners’ greed. The owners could lock the players out for the entire season if they wanted to. The Bryce Harpers and Max Scherzers of the world wouldn’t feel the hurt, but the hundreds of other players – guys clinging to a 40-man roster spot, backups, fringe starters, pre-arb players, etc. – would feel the pressure without those MLB paychecks coming in on a regular basis. Eating up half a season, or an entire season would also eat into the owners’ profits quite a bit, so they have a balancing act here. How big of a “loss” are they willing to suffer in order to keep their workforce in line? A big CBA win by the union, which it hasn’t had in quite some time, would slow down the doomsday clock, so to speak.

All of this, though, is happening in the River of Capitalism, flowing towards the ocean of complete optimization. Profits 1, Expenses 0. This children’s game that we’ve adored for decades is slowly and inexorably eating itself alive because of the profit motive.