Regarding the absurdly low pay of minor league players:
1. Of the players with a realistic chance of making the majors, most have bonus money they can use to upgrade their standard of living while in the minors.
2. The rest are there for the love of the game. If some of them can't get by on that, and leave for greener pastures, they can be easily replaced (you once wrote in a Hey Bill answer that there are always players looking for work).
To what extent, in your view, is each of the above statements true?
Asked by: RexLittle
Answered: 11/14/2021
Well. . point 1; let me address that. A couple of years ago, it was widely observed that the average salary for minor league players was less than $10,000 per year. But no one seems to know what it was, IF YOU INCLUDED THE SIGNING BONUSES THAT WERE PAID when the players entered the system. My guess. . . .could be wrong. . . my guess is that that would raise or would have raised the average salary of a minor leaguer to somewhere between $45,000 and $50,000. Quite a bit different.
But this is not to say that there was not a problem. There WAS a problem. The problem was that the bonus went to a small subsection of the minor league players, so that most of them actually WERE playing for very little money, while a minority of them were sitting on large signing bonuses. It was/is an inequitable system, undesirable from my standpoint. There WERE exploited workers within the system, in my view.
Regarding Point 2, I would question the way that you phrased it. No doubt the rest of the minor league players love the game, but being a minor league player, playing 140 games plus a month of training. . it's not a hell of a lot of fun, although almost everybody looks back on it afterward and remembers it as a grand experience. But it would be equally accurate to say that they are forgoing present earnings in the hope of BIG earnings in the future, when in reality most of them had zero or near-zero chance of seeing those big earnings in the future. They were being "paid" with an illusion that would eventually disappear on them, with the exception of an occasional player who would somehow break on through to the other side.
It wasn't really a good system. It was a system in need of reform. But in order to reform it, you needed to accept a few hard realities that people don't want to hear. The economic value of a minor league player in 2019 was essentially zero. It was a different system; the minor leagues were something ENTIRELY different 140 years ago, that had changed a little bit and changed a little bit and changed a little bit, and so there was the . . .what is the word for that? THere was this "relic" of a structure, a structure inherited from generations ago, which didn't actually serve the needs of the present either from the standpoint of the owners or the standpoint of the players, but it was still there, standing, as Coleridge said of the ancient regime in France before the revolution, still standing because no one yet had taken the trouble to push it over and blow it away.
There is a word for a relic of a structure like that; I can't think what it is.
Most of the minor league players in that era had zero value to the major league teams, absolutely zero value. They had NEGATIVE value. They weren't bringing in ANY revenue to the major leagues; actually, the opposite. They were an expense, rather than a revenue producer--and also, they had no asset value. You couldn't sell them or trade them or get anything in return for them. Their economic value was zero--zero asset value, and zero value in producing revenue.
ESSENTIALLY what happened two years ago--which has yet to shake itself out because of the pandemic--but what essentially happened is that the minor leaguers demanded to be paid what they were worth, at which point they discovered that they weren't actually worth anything. The major league teams told them to get lost, we can move forward just fine without you; thank you very much. Nobody wants to HEAR that, but that IS what happened. Employees who had zero economic value demanded to be paid what they were worth.
The "value" of 80% of the minor league players was that they created a competitive structure, a framework of teams, within which the relatively few players who had bright futures could develop their skills. But, because they were all operating within this played-out structure inherited from generations before, the development costs were dozens of times higher than they needed to be from a practical standpoint. So the minor leaguers attempt to organize themselves and demand living wages became the hand the pushed over the old, decayed structure within which they were operating.
