One Minor (League) Concession
Plus, Southpaw swag.
Dear Readers,
The sports world is abuzz… the rumors are true… at long last, Southpaw merch has arrived.
We’ve spent quite a while tinkering with (and procrastinating on) the idea of creating some new apparel, but we’ve finally pulled it together: our first t-shirt. Here’s a (somewhat crude) mockup of the design, courtesy of our friend Sarisha Kurup:
If you were kind enough to donate some money to us way back during our first fundraising drive in December of 2020, then congratulations—you’ve won yourself a free t-shirt! We think we have all of your names, and we’ll be contacting you individually for shipping details. But if you think you gave us some money and you don’t hear from us in the next couple of days, let us know and we’ll take it up with our accountant (i.e. Calder).
Otherwise, we’ll be selling the shirts for $20. If you want one, feel free to simply reply to this email or email us at editor@southpawreport.com with your preferred size, and we can work out a way to get you your shirt. Alternatively, you can wait for us to drop our exclusive Southpaw tote, which, at our current pace, will be available sometime around September of 2025.
Whether or not you buy a t-shirt (or pre-order a tote), we appreciate all of your continued support. Now, we hope you’ll enjoy a quick piece on one of our favorite topics: some Major League buffoonery.
-Ian and Calder
Major League Baseball’s Minor League Bargaining Chip
As negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement continue to falter between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the details. As we’ve discussed before, the basic dynamics of these negotiations are not that complicated, and the nitty-gritty details can serve to distract casual observers from the basic fact that Major League Baseball wants more money for itself and less for the people who actually create the league’s value: the players.
But sometimes, the devil actually is in the details.
Take, for example, MLB’s most recent proposal to the players’ association, details of which emerged this week. In its proposal, MLB agreed to one of the union’s demands: to limit the number of times a player can be optioned back and forth between the minor leagues and the majors in a season.
In layman’s terms, what does that mean? Stick with us here for just a second as we try to explain some of the oddities of professional baseball’s rules and regulations. Under baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement, most professional players can be “optioned”—or sent back and forth between the major leagues and their minor league affiliates—three separate times during their career. Although that might sound pretty straightforward, there’s an important catch: once a club uses a player’s option, that player can be moved back and forth between the major leagues and the minors as many times as the club wants during that season.
For minor leaguers who might be right on the edge of making the major leagues, this means they generally have three (not necessarily consecutive) years to earn a spot on a big-league roster. But there’s a major downside as well. Based on the way the option system currently works, clubs are incentivized not to waste an option year on a player who hasn’t been optioned yet, meaning that teams tend to option the same players over and over again during the same season.
Let’s say, for instance, that it’s the middle of July, and the Baltimore Orioles are in need of a relief pitcher for their major league roster. They have two, about equally good players in the minors: one player who’s already been in the big leagues that year, and one who hasn’t. They’re almost always going to choose the guy who’s been up already, while the other guy, despite being just as talented as his teammate, stays stuck riding the bus for an entire season.
This denies many minor leaguers opportunities, but can also create an unpleasant situation for optioned players, who sometimes spend entire seasons flying back and forth on very short notice between their minor league club and their major league affiliate. To lift some of the strain that teams place on optioned players, as well as to create more opportunities for other minor leagues to have their day in the Show, the players’ union wants the league to revise the option system to limit the number of times a player can be moved back and forth in a given season.
And this week, in what at first appeared to be a show-of-good-faith offer, Major League Baseball agreed to cap the number of times a player can be optioned in one season to five (that’s still a lot of times—imagine your job asking you to move back and forth between Oklahoma City and Los Angeles five times in a year). But given that this proposal was made by Rob Manfred and his merry band of private equity freaks, it of course came with a cynical catch.
In exchange for this five-options-a-year deal cap, MLB asked for the right to reduce the number of players that teams can carry across all their minor league rosters from 180 to 150 in 2023 and beyond. That’s almost a 17% reduction in jobs for minor leaguers.
Fortunately, the MLBPA doesn’t seem to be inclined to trade a few cross-country flights for hundreds of minor league jobs. They’ve thus far rejected the proposal. But the reason Manfred thought the league might be able to get away with this ploy at all is that the league isn’t negotiating with the minor leaguers—who aren’t entitled to bargaining collectively and don’t have a union to protect their interests—but with the MLBPA, which only protects the interests of major league players.
Here’s where the problem gets really thorny. MLB’s owners are responsible not only for their major league clubs, but also for their minor league affiliates. The MLBPA, by contrast, is duty-bound to represent the interests of major league ballplayers. What has developed is a situation in which the entity that’s empowered to protect minor leaguers and their jobs—Major League Baseball itself—is willing to trade those jobs away, while the group whose material interests are, in this instance, actually at odds with the interests of minor leaguers—the MLBPA—is the power standing up for them. If that isn’t is a clear indication of the futile nature of MLB’s labor dynamics, then we’re not sure what is.
Now, we’re glad the MLBPA isn’t willing to sacrifice hundreds of minor league jobs, but there’s nothing in the structure of MLB’s collective bargaining system that guarantees that dynamic will remain the same. If down the road, the MLBPA decides that trading away those jobs will be a necessary evil to protect the interest of their union members, nothing would stand in its way.
To be clear, we don’t love using the phrase “millionaires vs. billionaires” to describe MLB labor negotiations, both because it’s reductive—there is, after all, a notable difference between having one million dollars and having one billion dollars—and because it papers over the very real soft power that owners wield over their workers. But the truth is that most major league ballplayers are, at the very least, financially stable, while their compatriots in the minors are not. Per year, minor leaguers can expect to pull in between $7,000 and $11,000. (That’s not a typo.) It’s flatly ludicrous to expect the MLBPA to protect the long-term interest of minor leaguers, especially when MLB’s owners aren’t willing to do so themselves.
Fortunately, minor leaguers and the informal advocacy groups that have popped up to protect their interest have won some recent victories. In 2020, for instance, the Supreme Court cleared the way for a class-action lawsuit challenging the minor league pay structure under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and minor league advocates are currently waging another major battle in the courts to challenge MLB’s 100-year old antitrust exemption, which critics say allows MLB to artificially depress minor leaguers’ wages. Minor league advocacy groups also recently convinced MLB to guarantee affordable housing for minor leaguers, a concession it had been previously been reluctant to make.
You’ll have to excuse us, though, if we don’t have unbridled faith in the Supreme Court and MLB to protect the rights of the little guy in the longer term. These problems will persist until minor leaguers win the right to form a union and bargain collectively. For now, though, without a union to protect them, and even though major leaguers remain locked out, minor leaguers around the country have to make their way to Florida and Arizona for Spring Training. Which, by the way, they aren’t paid for at all.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the moment that broke the Olympics? “Kamila Valieva’s torment will be the sad legacy of the Beijing Olympics,” by Jerry Brewer in The Washington Post (February 17, 2022).
. . . MLB’s long-term play to break the MLBPA? “MLB’s Owners Want To Make Their Favorite Loopholes Into Law,” by Marc Normandin in Defector (February 18, 2022).
. . . a new Olympic sport? “The One-Woman Glories of Monobob, the Olympics’ Newest Sport” by Sarah Larson in The New Yorker (February 17, 2022).