$10,750.
That’s the minimum salary paid to a Triple-A baseball player. With players playing from February until October that amounts to $1,343.75 per month. Now, major league baseball teams will tell you they’re paying the players a more manageable $2,150.00 per month. They say this because teams begin paying their minor leaguers once the minor league season begins in April, and they stop once the minor league season ends in August. That means a minor leaguer is working for free during Spring Training, which is a peculiar stance considering Spring Training is mandatory. Of course, Major League Baseball believes this is fair because they deem minor league players “seasonal apprenticeships.”
The end result is a salary is insufficient to support a person let alone a family. Sooner or later push comes to shove, and someone is going to be forced to fight back. And as poignantly pointed out by columnist Ted Berg in an exclusive for USA Today, one such player is Mets minor leaguer Kyle Johnson.
Johnson is part of a group of four minor leaguer players suing Major League Baseball seeking a fair wage. They are alleging Major League baseball has violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by paying them a wage well under minimum wage. They are seeking class action status so the efforts can be for the betterment of all minor leaguers. Mostly, this group of players is just looking for an avenue to make ends meet.
“I truly believe we’re very grossly underpaid, and there are not many people willing to stand up and talk about it. The way it has always gone is, ‘shut up, or you’ll piss off the wrong people, and you’re not going to have this opportunity anymore.’… I’m not saying pay every guy $200 grand a year, but pay him a living wage year-round – something in the $40-60,000 a year range, where I can have a family and not have to worry every second about the bills that we have, or if I can sign my daughter up for gymnastics.”
Another person this bothered was Johnson’s attorney Garrett Broshuis. Broshuis was once himself a minor leauger in the San Francisco Giants system. Before ending his career to pursue his legal career, he was interested in unionizing minor leaguer players to help give them a voice. Broshius detailed why those efforts fell short:
“The biggest challenge is that guys are very reluctant to upset the status quo. My final year of playing, I talked to a number of guys about the possibility of unionizing. It was something we frequently talked about in the clubhouse. But guys were very reluctant to take that step, because they’re trying to reach the big leagues and they’re afraid of the repercussions.”
With unionizing being next to impossible, Broshuis, a lawyer, did the next best thing. He filed a lawsuit to attain the rights minor league players might’ve been able to acquire if there weren’t so many logistical obstacles to organizing. If the lawsuit is successful, each and every minor leauger could potentially see an increase in income which would cost major league teams approximately $7 million, which coincidentally was what the Mets paid Jon Niese in 2015.
For the major league teams, this is a balance sheet item. For players like Johnson? It is peace of mind. In the end that’s all Johnson is looking for saying, ““If I knew that, no matter what affiliate I would be at, I had a bed, I had a place to stay where there was heat or air conditioning, depending on the season, if I knew I had a stable place where I could bring my wife and bring my kids and not have to scramble, that would be a huge burden off me.”
I encourage you to read the full article here.
