Minor Leaguers Score Major Win
Their housing problems appear a thing of the past. How'd they beat MLB?
Dear Readers,
We decided to cover some news today that broke last Sunday, after our last newsletter came out. (This is always happening to us!) We know we can get a little bit cranky on here, but today we’re discussing a genuinely good development. Woohoo!!
-Ian and Calder
Minor League Baseball Players Scored a Major Victory. How’d They Do It?
By now, the scenes of squalor that characterize the lives of minor league baseball players should be familiar to readers of this newsletter: players packed two and three to a room, sleeping on bare blowup mattresses in dank and depressing basement apartments.
But soon, thanks to the courageous activism of minor leaguers and a handful of activist groups who support them, these conditions should be a thing of the past.
Last Sunday, Major League Baseball announced that it will require minor league teams to provide housing for minor league players beginning in 2022. The league has not announced whether it will provide housing itself or whether teams will give players vouchers or subsidies to cover the cost of renting, but the precise mechanism is less important than the outcome: minor league players, who make (often even less than) pennies on the dollar compared to their Major League counterparts, will no longer have to spend significant portions of their salaries to live in worse-than-frat-house conditions.
The timing of the announcement is not a coincidence. Over the past year year and a half, two new advocacy groups—Advocates for Minor Leaguers and More Than Baseball—have made the housing issue a top priority, using social and traditional media to draw attention to minor leaguers’ terrible living conditions and the impact these conditions have on players’ physical and mental health. Some of the stories that came out of this media blitz have been genuinely moving, even for jaded baseball scrooges like us. In one video, produced by the labor-friendly media company A More Perfect Union, a minor league player describes how the working and living conditions he endured while in the leagues led him to develop serious depression and debilitating substance abuse disorder.
“There’s a deep sense of pervasive sadness that underpins this game at times,” the player says. “It feels like a direct slap in the face to everyone who puts on the cleats and plays for the organizations that we are giving our hearts, bodies, mind, and souls to this game, and the payback coming back to some players is negative—guys are losing money, losing health.”
Housing is not the only issue on these groups’ agenda. In the longer term, they’re also working to address players’ woefully inadequate nutrition, pitifully low wages, perpetual job insecurity, and lack of basic workplace protections. But MLB’s concession on housing is both a material and a moral victory, having compelled the league to acknowledge that minor leaguers’ living conditions are unsustainable and then forcing it to do something about it.
As tacky as it might sound, it’s hard not to see a sort of elegant symmetry between the fight unfolding in the minor leagues and the fight unfolding on Capitol Hill over the Democrats’ reconciliation package. Minor leaguers are not demanding radical changes to the structure of the leagues. They’re not demanding the massive downward distribution of MLB’s revenue, or a groundbreaking revenue-sharing model, or unprecedented worker representation in the league’s management (although, in our humble opinion, they probably should). Instead, they’re asking for the league that generated $3.6 billion in revenue last year to use a modest amount of that capital to provide them with affordable housing, a living wage, and modest subsidies for essential needs like food and equipment. In short, they’re asking for basic minimum protections to help them keep their heads above water while they earn money for someone else.
Obviously, the situation on Capitol Hill is a bit more complicated than this, but it is not fundamentally different. Progressives fighting to protect basic welfare programs in the Democrats’ reconciliation bill are not fighting to transform American capitalism; they’re fighting to make sure that millionaires pay their taxes so that kids living in the richest country in the world don’t spend their entire lives in poverty, and that working parents can take a few weeks off to care for their newborn children without going broke.
If you’ve been reading the newsletter for a while, you might be familiar with Southpaw’s vulgar Marxist theory of progress in the sporting world: make it unprofitable for a team/league/owner to do something, and pretty soon, that team/league/owner will stop doing that thing. MLB’s concessions on housing strike us as a notable exception to that rule. Why did advocacy succeed in this instance when it so often fails?
It’s probably a confluence of factors. MLB teams have some financial incentive to treat their minor leaguers well, especially if they end up playing for the big league team. Minor league advocacy groups have brought lawsuits that will make it more difficult for mistreatment and underpayment to continue. But an essential factor is that advocates for minor leaguers caused enough of a stink that MLB owners weighed their options and decided that folding would be the path of least resistance.
It remains to be seen what sort of stink Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will respond to—nothing so far seems to be working. But, as minor league baseball advocates proved, it’s worth trying.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . more NBA vaccine drama, courtesy of interview-master Isaac Chotiner? “Covering the Drama of the N.B.A., On and Off the Court,” by Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker (October 19, 2021).
. . . the proliferation of independent abuse hotlines in sports leagues? “Outside Hotlines for Athletes Are a Sign of Strained Trust in Sports,” by David W. Chen in The New York Times (October 22, 2021).