The American Prospect - The Poverty Wages and Indentured Servitude of Baseball’s Minor Leaguers

Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan puts forth how Major League’s Baseball’s antitrust exemption perpetuates the collusive exploitation of minor league players.

America’s pastime has completed nearly one month of regular-season play, and getting even this far was not easy. When the teams locked out their players last December, following the expiration of the previous collective-bargaining agreement, it wasn’t clear whether any Major League Baseball games would take place in 2022.

On March 10, however, the Major League Baseball Players Association and the owners ratified a new agreement and ended the 99-day work lockout. In the compromise the two sides reached, the players won some important gains, including a minimum annual salary of $700,000.

The story for minor league players, though, is very different. Last fall, the nonprofit Advocates for Minor Leaguers shared a video of a minor league baseball player sleeping in his car. The player was an employee of the Chicago Cubs, a major league team recently valued at nearly $4 billion, and a member of the “farm system” in a league that reported nearly $11 billion in revenue in 2019. How could he be working and living in such brutal conditions and squalor?

The answer lies in a unique and unjust facet of American law: baseball’s antitrust exemption.

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