Celebrate Opening Day with a Union Victory
Old fashioned organizing won minor league ballpayers huge pay increases.
Dear readers,
We made it. After five long, baseball-less months, we’ve made it to Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, and we couldn’t be happier. (Well, Ian would be happier if the Nationals actually won a game this season, but he’s not holding his breath.)
Opening Day is a prize unto itself, but this year, it came with the perfect Southpaw cherry on top. Let’s get to it.
-Calder & Ian
Union power makes Opening Day even sweeter
There’s an old cliche among baseball fans that Opening Day is the most hopeful day of the year — and with good reason. Before the first batter steps into the box, every team is undefeated, and anything is possible in the adrenaline-addled brain of a baseball fan after the long, empty winter. In spring, hope springs eternal.
On this Opening Day, which fell this past Thursday, there was even more reason than usual to be optimistic about baseball’s future. On Wednesday evening, less than a day before major league teams took the field, news broke that Major League Baseball and the newly-formed union for minor league players had reached a tentative deal on the minor league’s first-ever collective bargaining agreement.
The deal is — to put it mildly — a big fucking deal. The agreement, which will last for five years, will more than double minimum salaries across the minor leagues’ various levels, raising base pay for Triple-A from $17,500 to $35,800, for Double-A from $13,800 to $30,250, for High-A: $11,000 to $27,300, for Single-A: $11,000 to $26,200, and for the Complex league (a rookie-level league), from $4,800 to $19,800.
The deal also guarantees that players will be paid year-round with the exception of a six-week break during the winter, as opposed to the current arrangement, in which players are only paid during the relatively short minor league season. That means that in at least some cases, players will be able to stop driving Uber and delivering DoorDash in the off-season and focus instead on their baseball careers (though none of these increases, however large, adds up to a living wage).
The deal also codifies new rules about minimum housing requirements for minor leaguers, ensuring that players in Double- and Triple-A will get their own bedrooms and that players with families will be given special accommodations. For Single- and High-A players, the deal guarantees paid transportation to and from stadiums and sets new rules about clubhouse nutrition — which, as you might imagine, is currently pretty abysmal.
The timing of the deal was made especially sweet by the fact that it coincided with a decision by a federal judge in Oklahoma to approve a $185 million settlement in a lawsuit brought against Major League Baseball by a group of minor leaguers for violating federal labor law. Although a settlement is not a statement of guilt, the facts that emerged in the course of the lawsuit — which we’ve covered extensively before — suggest that the league took active measures to skirt federal minimum wage protections for minor league players. The lawsuit, which has been working its way through the courts since 2014, played a major role in spurring the renewed labor militancy that delivered this new deal. Talk about poetic justice.
When the books covering this era of baseball history get written (maybe by one of us — who knows!), there may appear to be a sense of inevitability about these developments. Between the minimum wage lawsuit, MLB’s overly-aggressive reorganization of the minor leagues, the general uptick in labor militancy around the country, and the social justice reckoning that swept across the sporting world in recent years, it’s easy to think that the formation of a minor league union was overdetermined.
But this outcome was hardly inevitable. Even as recently as November 2020 — when we first covered the minimum wage lawsuit for Southpaw — the prospects of a minor league union seemed very, very distant. In reality, the movement got its first real start when a handful of minor leaguers tweeted pictures of the abysmal conditions in which they lived and worked. The speed with which the union came together after that is a testament to the incredible work that’s been done by organizations like Advocates for Minor Leaguers, founded by pitcher-turned-lawyer named Garrett Broshuis, who represented the lead plaintiff in the minimum wage lawsuit, and who has since joined the staff of the MLBPA. We may not be able to tweet our way to the promised land, but a few well-placed missives certainly didn’t hurt the minor leaguers’ cause.
So where does this leave us? As Broshuis said this week, the deal isn’t perfect — no deal is — but it is a massive step forward — one that will materially improve the lives of thousands of minor leagues. To paraphrase a canonical baseball film, it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball, and it’s even harder not to be romantic about the power of collective action in baseball. A handful of players with very few resources, very little economic power, and very little public visibility took on their employer — the richest and most powerful baseball corporation in the world — and they won. They did it, and they did it on the day that thousands of fans around the country will flock to stadiums to celebrate Opening Day, the most hopeful day, the best day of the year.
Now let’s play ball.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . how the Russian National Team is somehow playing soccer again (and their choice opponents)? “Russia are playing soccer again despite FIFA suspension. How? Because of sports, politics connection” by Gab Marcotti in ESPN (March 27, 2023).
. . . politicians making fools of themselves on Opening Day? “Local Politicians Enthused By Return Of Base Ball” by David Roth in Defector (March 31, 2023).
. . . the strange case of Lamar Jackson, another NFL Quarterback with tremendous skills who the league is trying to cast aside? “Every NFL player should support Lamar Jackson’s fight” by Kevin B. Blackistone in the Washington Post (April 1, 2023).