Atlanta Braves Afternoon Chop – Special Edition
2014 photo of Mississippi Braves players getting ready for a game in Huntsville, AL. Photo credit: Alan Carpenter, TomahawkTake.com
Baseball’s Error – An Editorial
Continuing to pay minor league players at levels below that of the day-laborer is wrong. This cannot go well for the MLB, and continuing to hide behind their Anti-trust exemption shield may not work for this issue.
Let’s suppose that an average minor league ball player works between March 1 and August 31 each year, working six days a week (simplified for the sake of the argument). I’ll even round down for the sake of an All-Star break.
That’s 30 weeks out of the year that a player is in uniform, working out, training, re-habbing, playing, making appearances on behalf of the team, giving interviews, doing promotions, … whatever. On an average game day, players are at the park perhaps 3 hours before each game, play for 2-1/2 hours, and then leave 30 minutes thereafter… and that 6 hour day estimate could be the minimum, too.
So let’s do that math: 30 weeks x 6 days x 6 hours = 1080 hours for a season. That comes out to somewhere between $5 and $10 an hour using the figures from the BA.com article.
There’s probably some accounting to be done for equipment, meals, accommodations, and transportation, but frankly, baseball teams are little different in this regard from an office job in which employees are provided with office furniture, phone, a computer, and travel expenses if they are required to travel on business.
There’s no way that major league baseball can win this: even if they happen to win in court, they will lose in the court of public opinion. The vast majority of professional baseball players will never make the majors and will never see the best draft-day signing bonuses. Thus, their reward for toiling for 3-5 years? Maybe $6000 plus maybe a $5-10K signing deal… total.
These days, that won’t even buy them a car to drive home in… unless it’s a few years old.
What Would It Cost?
Again, let’s simplify things: suppose an organization has 30 players attached to their roster at every level of the minors (the Carolina Mudcats had exactly 30 as of this writing).
For the Braves, for instance, that’s a group of instructional league players and the teams at the GCL, Danville, Rome, Zebulon, Pearl, and Gwinnett (not counting the Dominican Summer League or Arizona Fall League). That’s 7 levels/210 players.
If these players are given an average of $1300 a month, a total monthly payroll of $273,000 across the organization; $1,365,000 for the entire season.
To bump them to something beyond minimum wage – say $15 an hour – would get players to $16,200 each with a total payroll of $3,402,000.
$20 an hour perhaps? Not at all unreasonable given the rarity of their skillset: $21,600 per player and $4,536,000 for the season across the organization. Again, these are ballpark figures (no pun intended), but they’re probably within 25% either direction. I would be happy to entertain corrected figures, if “actuals” can be supplied.
So for the additional price of 4 minimum-wage major leaguers, each team could pay all of their minor league players $15 an hour and make this lawsuit go away… never mind the public relations headache.
And that’s probably the minimum that they should do. One has to wonder how much the attorneys are getting for fighting this case in multiple courts.
As noted by Ballparkdigest, a few teams are actually exempt from this lawsuit. Those teams are the Atlanta Braves, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Philadelphia Phillies, Tampa Bay Rays and Washington Nationals. The reason for this has to do with the fact that the suit was filed by California League players, and these clubs do not do officially conduct their minor league business in the State of California.
Regardless, that won’t ultimately matter… and it would be wise for these clubs to get out ahead of this issue and make it right.
Something to consider… and then we’ll need to talk about the umpires, coaches, broadcasters, … and our scouts.