MLB to require teams to provide housing for minor leaguers

October 18, 2021 7:10 AM

Amid mounting pressure from players and advocacy groups, Major League Baseball said on Sunday it will require teams to provide housing for minor league players starting in 2022.

Minor league baseball players routinely make less than minimum wage. They are responsible for securing their own housing for home games during the season despite: making less than poverty-level wages; frequently moving from city to city with promotions/demotions/transactions; and having no guarantee of continued employment. The net result is that many of the young players who represent the future of the game are malnourished, constantly in debt, sleeping on air mattresses or in sleeping bags in overcrowded apartments, living in their cars, or worse. During the off-season, they are responsible for continuing their training, despite not receiving wages of any kind.

Increasing pressure from advocacy groups like More Than Baseball and Advocates for Minor Leaguers and recent exposés like this one from The Athletic (alt Archive.is link) have ratcheted up the pressure on major league teams to improve living and working conditions for their minor leaguers.

The housing initiative is supposed to start in 2022, but the actual plan hasn't been announced yet. Notably, some statements include the weasel words "certain minor leaguers."

The Moneyball era of baseball sees smart teams ceaselessly seeking out competitive advantages against one another. The game has also seen increased focus in recent years on the value of minor league prospects. Given all of that, you might think teams would geta better return on their investment by, y'know, making sure their players got to sleep in beds and eat regular meals. Russell Carleton has done an entire series on this for Baseball Prospectus, crunching the numbers, and it turns out, unsurprisingly: yeah, that is exactly what the math indicates. (free account required to read.)

posted by DirtyOldTown (24 comments total)

Contraction of minor league rosters and teams in 3...2...1...
posted by Billiken at 7:17 AM on October 18, 2021

Contraction of minor league rosters and teams in 3...2...1...

They literally already did that. 2021 was the first season of the reduced minor leagues.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:18 AM on October 18, 2021 [15 favorites]

It feels like the MLB and the Union don't exactly know where the future comes from?
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:47 AM on October 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

No doubt. MLB should just use the free training that the NCAA provides to the NFL and NBA.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:17 AM on October 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

This is a start. Not the end goal by far. They're buckling to public pressure on this issue but the pressure needs to keep up.
posted by thecjm at 8:36 AM on October 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

There are a fraction as many NCAA baseball scholarships as there are for basketball and football. Even after going pro, former college players who reach the majors typically only do so after 2-4 additional years of minor league play. Plus, a sizable proportion of minor leaguers are from international backgrounds and may not have the English language skills or traditional academic background to attend a US college. There's no way around it: the minor leagues are necessary.

My lunatic proposal is this: have minor league teams be run by baseball pitching/mechanics labs. Rather than draft amateurs, let them be hired by these companies as employees. The companies will then develop the players at their own expense while providing housing, meals, conditioning, off-season pay, etc. Then, when the players are deemed ready for the majors, let the teams pay a "posting fee" as they do to acquire Japanese and Korean league players. The labs keep the posting fee and that supplements their income as a minor league club enough to be workable as a business model. The players sign a free agent contract (at market rate, no "control" or "arbitration") and are paid fairly. You'd have to work out something for players who are tweeners, whose rights would be acquired even as they may not be ready to be in the majors permanently/immediately. But it's a lot more workable to have the players making a living, being focused on as prospects by people who want to maximize their value, and then being free to actually be paid fairly when they are ready to make the jump.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:37 AM on October 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

Maybe they can start paying professional cheerleaders next.
posted by cilantro at 8:41 AM on October 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

There are no cheerleaders in baseball. I agree with you but let's not make this everything that sucks about every professional sport.
posted by cmfletcher at 8:55 AM on October 18, 2021 [20 favorites]

Seems like you're really limiting the potential talent pool when you don't pay them enough to live.
posted by subdee at 9:26 AM on October 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

I can guarantee you will radicalize some of the sports fans in your life if you can get them to read that piece from The Athletic. Holy shit.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:47 AM on October 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

BOUT TIME!
posted by epj at 9:57 AM on October 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

It feels like the MLB and the Union don't exactly know where the future comes from?

Seems like you're really limiting the potential talent pool when you don't pay them enough to live.

It's like unpaid internships at Hollywood. The payoffs are so big (and glamorous) that enough people want to do it no matter how bad the conditions.

Shrinking the talent pool in this context is a feature, not a bug. You have to find ways to turn away lots of people. Also, worth mentioning that there are minor league contracts worth a lot of money--so if teams are convinced a young player is good they won't be leaving baseball because they can't afford housing. (To be sure talent recognition is hard in baseball than other sports, so not denying some good players get lost for sure.)

Last point is most of the minor league players are not "the future" in any meaningful sense--almost everyone there is a permanent minor leaguer with no chance of ever making the majors. It's not like everyone can level up if they just put in the time.

[I should be clear I am not defending this approach; it's more that "exploitation makes sense from the point of the view of the bosses" and I'm really glad that it will get slightly better.]
posted by mark k at 10:00 AM on October 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

We may have convinced ourselves that the best prospects sign for bonuses and largely do not experience this financial insecurity. This can be true, even as the reality may also include the inverse: that players who do not experience financial insecurity are more likely to have the opportunity to become top prospects. There is very likely a substantial sunset of players who did not sign for bonuses that allow them to live comfortable lives while developing, but could have developed into top prospects had they only slept well, eaten regularly, not had to expend tremendous amounts of energy meet sunsisting.

Check out that Carleton piece in Baseball Prospectus. He cracks open the math pretty convincingly.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:22 AM on October 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

I follow baseball pretty closely, and I still don't fully understand why baseball, in particular, has such a long development process compared to other sports.

Is it the diversity of skillsets required? Is it the fact that they get relatively few competitive reps to swing a bat or field a ball in the course of a high school, college, or minor league season?

There are plenty of sports that require the pinpoint accuracy of baseball that don't require nearly as much development time to reach the top levels.
posted by thecjm at 10:36 AM on October 18, 2021

Baseball is a set of skills that, generally speaking, has to be learned incrementally, against progressively higher and higher levels of competition. The mix of natural talent/physicality and learned skill seems to tilt more toward the latter than in any other major US sport.

The classic example is Michael Jordan, universally acclaimed as one of the finest athletes in the world, but despite his best efforts, he got too late a start to develop the pitch recognition, the plate discipline, the defensive instincts to play baseball. He might have gotten there had he focused on baseball as a younger man. But he started too late to finish the work, and during his time in the minor leagues, he was mostly substandard. (If anything, the fact that he could be mediocre in Double A despite having years less practice than his teammates confirms his amazing physical gifts.)

Weirdly, though, it is increasingly becoming a truism that the most talented players in the minor leagues are in Double A. These days, Triple A functions as much or more as a holding pen for depth players who may be needed soon as it does a developmental stage. As such, Triple A is loaded with journeymen: 29 year old outfielders who will be up for two weeks when someone gets hurt; 31 year-old former major league pitchers hanging around for another opportunity, a spot start in a double header maybe. These players will have lower natural talent levels than Double A players, but more refined skills. Double A, by contrast, is almost entirely young players whose defining trait is talent. You won't usually see a 33 y/o junkballer in Double A. But the arms you do see will likely have live fastballs, hammer curves, hard sliders, etc. Double A is the highest level a player is really proving themselves. Triple A is mostly subtle refinement and waiting your turn. This is why so many top prospects skip AAA altogether anymore.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:50 AM on October 18, 2021 [12 favorites]

Along with this; I hope that they start putting Age restriction of some sort (maybe number of years at that level); before you have to leave. That will force teams to not keep players who are delusional about their abilities hanging around the periphery. Like if in 3 years you haven't progressed to a higher level; cut bait. This will make players who have no chance of seeing big money to get a start on their post baseball life.

Plus: there needs to be an international draft to go along with this. A lot of the shady stuff is done outside the purview of the labor laws of the US in Caribbean countries.
posted by indianbadger1 at 12:57 PM on October 18, 2021

Anyone who puts themselves under the care & control of a sports organization has to be made to understand they're no longer considered human beings under anyone's estimation except for whatever needs to be done to keep their muscles functioning.
posted by bleep at 1:25 PM on October 18, 2021

Like if in 3 years you haven't progressed to a higher level; cut bait.

There's not a problem with attrition. Research does not indicate there are too many older players clogging up the minor leagues. It indicates that the minor leagues depend on brutal, repetitive turnover of younger players. This is because, except for obvious future stars bolstered by large signing bonuses, teams treat players extremely poorly. The result is that many of the edge case players (who could be major leaguers, given the right development) fail to survive long enough to achieve their potential, whatever that might be. The minor leagues would likely be more productive and competitive and harder to get into (and more fun for fans to watch), if players could simply afford to live even vaguely comfortably while honing their skills.

Anyone who puts themselves under the care & control of a sports organization has to be made to understand they're no longer considered human beings under anyone's estimation except for whatever needs to be done to keep their muscles functioning.

I realize you mean that as a warning to the players, not a way of us wiping our hands clean of their problems. But we're at a moment where those issues can realistically hope to be addressed. So let's uh, keep our eyes on the ball, right?

Each team in the (wildly profitable) major leagues could give all of their 180 rostered minor leaguers a $15,000 a year raise for approximately the cost of a single mid-range middle reliever or platoon outfielder. ($2.7 MM per org). And, as Russell Carleton points out in the BPro article, higher wages/amenities for minor leaguers shouldn't be seen as an expense but as an investment. Teams would get better results in player development, to an extent that would more than justify the costs.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:45 PM on October 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

I'm still mad about the contraction of the minor leagues the other year because I really do prefer the experience of watching the minors more than the pros. More emotion, more mistakes and more change. (plus, generally less 3 true outcomes ball - bleck)
posted by drewbage1847 at 3:28 PM on October 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Baseball is really hard, so you need to sift through a whole lot of players to find ones that can play in the major leagues. They don't need rules limiting stockpiling at any level for any number of years because they have roster size limits that only let teams own the rights to a certain number of players at any time. With new faces coming up every year it's up or out for the middling guys from three or four years ago, gotta make room. And it gets even more crowded when an arm injury puts a young pitcher on the shelf for a year recovering from pretty common surgeries.

This is ridiculously overdue, especially given the amount of money being spent on developing players and how little it'll cost to take care of this.
posted by Cris E at 5:03 PM on October 18, 2021

Anyone who puts themselves under the care & control of a sports organization has to be made to understand they're no longer considered human beings under anyone's estimation except for whatever needs to be done to keep their muscles functioning.

I think the WNBA and (M)NBA are both making efforts to change this dynamic. They both have powerful players' unions and seem to value their athletes. Obviously there are still shitty owners in both leagues. But this collective bargaining agreement for the WNBA from almost two years ago is a great start:

Under the proposed collective bargaining agreement, the average compensation for WNBA players will exceed six figures for the first time. The new deal also includes drastic improvement in maternity and child-care benefits, enhanced travel standards and an avenue to equitable revenue sharing, all of which positions the WNBA as a progressive leader at a time when female athletes around the world are demanding better pay and treatment from their leagues.


MLB on the other hand... I dunno, seems like a pretty backwards bunch of people running that circus. As an A's fan I'm definitely biased though.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:05 PM on October 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Anakin: MLB is providing housing for minor league players.
Padme: Adequate housing, right?
posted by chrchr at 10:02 PM on October 18, 2021 [7 favorites]

The result is that many of the edge case players (who could be major leaguers, given the right development) fail to survive long enough to achieve their potential, whatever that might be.

While I more or less agree with the general drift of your point, this strikes me as a bit off. Players tend to be drafted because of some raw ability, sure, but suggestion development is mostly or solely a matter of "right" development is being too definitive about the process as many players would never develop enough to be major league caliber for their skills to be too limited or unable to be refined sufficiently. It's really tough to throw high 90s and consistently get the ball over the plate. No matter how much of the right kind of attention players get, some will never make that final leap, the same for bat control and other issues. None of which is to say taking better care of the players won't help some or that it shouldn't be done regardless of course.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:30 AM on October 19, 2021

Investment firms Endeavor and Silver Lake buying up minor league teams.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:12 PM on October 20, 2021 [1 favorite]