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The San Juan Daily Star
Monday, June 15, 2020
As money squabbles delay MLB, many workers ‘just get steamrolled’ By JAMES WAGNER
L
ike thousands of minor league baseball players, Zack Kelly knew May 31 was an important date. With professional baseball on pause because of the pandemic, MLB had ensured minor leaguers would be paid $400 a week through the end of the month — and Kelly had a hunch that some players would be released as that expiration date approached. He just didn’t think he would be one of them. Kelly, a right-handed pitcher, wasn’t a first-round pick or a notable prospect, but he was progressing steadily through the Los Angeles Angels’ farm system. Last season, at 24, he performed solidly at Class AA Mobile, a level where players typically earn about $9,300 a season. An elbow injury during spring training slowed him and he was awaiting surgery, but Kelly was looking forward to returning to the mound. Then came the news on May 29 that he was among the 39 minor league players released by the Angels. “It’s kind of frustrating because I felt like I had a career that wasn’t worthy of getting released at this point,” he said. Much of the baseball world has been focused on the bitter back-and-forth between MLB and the major league players’ union as they try to hash out their differences on pay in order to play some semblance of a season in 2020. But as MLB’s revenue has dried up significantly with the game on pause, much of the financial pain has also been felt by the vast constellation of club employees, minor league players and stadium workers who depend on the sport for their livelihood. Unlike the big-league players fighting to preserve their salaries, much of that workforce lacks a union, or has a much smaller safety net. “Sports are really a microcosm of society in a lot of ways, and one being that groups of workers who lack representation just get steamrolled when things like this happen,” said Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league pitcher who is now a lawyer and has been leading a class-action lawsuit against MLB teams over minor league wages since 2014. On March 31, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that the stipends for roughly 8,000 minor league players would continue until May 31 or until the start of their season, whichever came first. Three weeks later, Manfred sent a
Grounds crew members worked at the Seattle Mariners’ T-Mobile Park last month. M.L.B. still has no formal plans to begin its 2020 season. memo to the nearly 9,000 team employees governed by the uniform employee contract — which includes major and minor league coaches, scouts, trainers and some front office staffers — telling them that their contracts would be suspended as of May 1 because of the national emergency and lack of revenue. This gave teams the authority to enact furloughs, pay cuts and layoffs. Most clubs committed to paying their employees through May. But their plans diverged abruptly beginning June 1. With the minor league season unlikely to happen this year, each MLB organization had to decide individually whether to continue the weekly stipend to their 200-plus minor league players. All did so, besides a holdout from the Oakland Athletics — who reversed course last week after widespread criticism. Owner John Fisher issued an apology. “I concluded I’d made a mistake,” Fisher told the San Francisco Chronicle. In an industry where team owners are billionaires and the league itself took in more than $10 billion in revenue last year, some clubs have drawn praise for supporting their workers, while others have been denounced for doing much less. The Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins and St. Louis Cardinals, for example,
guaranteed employment and full salaries to their baseball operations employees for at least June. (The White Sox even committed to paying their released minor league players this month.) The Kansas City Royals and Twins pledged not to release any minor leaguers. But some teams, including big-market clubs like the Angels and the Athletics, slashed their costs. Royals general manager Dayton Moore, who took a pay cut to help prevent layoffs, noted that even players who peak at low levels of the minor leagues help contribute to the long-term growth of the sport. “Those individuals go back into their communities and teach the game, work in academies, are JUCO coaches, college coaches, scouts, coaches in pro baseball,” Moore told reporters. Normally, each major league franchise releases about two dozen minor league players during the spring, according to numbers tallied by Baseball America. The numbers appear to be higher this year — the Arizona Diamondbacks recently released at least 62 players, and the New York Yankees cut 45. The lack of minor league games wasn’t the only factor: New rules to go along with this year’s reduced, fiveround draft and the prospect of MLB cutting at least 40 minor league teams next season have also led some teams to cut more aggressively. “I feel for some of those guys,” said Kelly, adding that the Angels’ minor league players released were a mix of experienced, young and injured. He added: “It’s unfortunate and it stinks that it has to come down to a financially based motive.” The Angels — owned by Arte Moreno, who has an estimated net worth of over $3 billion — implemented some of the most drastic cost-cutting of any MLB team. They have released over 50 minor league players since March and instituted furloughs that gutted nearly every department of the organization, including trimming their amateur scouting group days before the draft began last Wednesday. The Angels said they had donated $1 million to an employee relief fund. According to details of the program sent to employees, they could apply for an immediate one-time $500 grant or submit a more detailed application for a needs-based grant. “We, like businesses throughout the United States, are making difficult decisions to protect our long-term stability,” Angels spokeswoman Marie Garvey said in a sta-
tement in late May. Up the highway in Los Angeles, the Dodgers, owned by billionaire Mark Walter, implemented a tiered system of pay cuts to avoid furloughs and layoffs. Fulltime employees making at least $75,000 a year saw a reduction, while those making more had their pay cut by up to 35 percent. Front office employees and minor league players aren’t represented by unions, leaving them up to the whims of their employers. Many stadium workers have unions, but they are subcontracted hourly workers and have had mixed results getting aid from teams. Major league players, on the other hand, agreed in March to be paid only for games played, and their union has resisted owners’ calls for deeper cuts. While no decision has been made on the length of a potential 2020 major league season, MLB has told the players’ union that teams would lose an average of $640,000 per game over an 82-game campaign played in empty stadiums if players were paid their full, prorated salaries, according to an Associated Press report last month — though the union is skeptical of the league’s accounting and has requested financial documents. David Carter, a professor of sports business at USC’s Marshall School of Business, said that while owners are indeed wealthy, they “aren’t necessarily liquid the way you or I might think a billionaire is.” Many owners are less concerned about yearly losses than they are with growing their team’s valuations so that they can net large profits from a later sale. Fewer workers are needed with no games happening, of course, but Carter argued that owners — and major league players — are not sympathetic figures in the current economic climate, with more than 20 million people unemployed in the United States. “That’s probably been the single area where there’s been bad public relations, bad messaging and ownership of the issue with franchise owners that have not come across very strong because they are perceived as this really elite business crowd,” he said. “You have people who are relying on minimum wage and that job at the arena as their second position to help put food on the table, and now they’re getting cut back — but, ‘Wait a minute, you’re still CEO of what company?’”