These days, how much does your average AAA, AA and A guy earn? Is there a base salary for the minor leagues? Do they get a big phat bonus if they’re bumped up to the majors for a couple games?
And isn’t it stupid that we still call them AAA, AA and A when there are no more B, C and D?
As for calling the leagues AAA, AA, A and Rookie, it’s a hold over from when there were minor leagues. There were a lot of A leagues and they needed to be differentiated. So you got AAA and AA too.
But then the B, C, and D leagues died out.
The Rookie leagues got added later with the advent of the amateur draft.
A leagues are also divided into “High A” and “Low A”.
Not sure what you mean by this. There still are minor leagues… seventeen of them operating this year (plus about ten or so independent minor leagues). The old classification system (A,B,C,D) has been changed (AAA,AA,A,R), but the reasoning is the same. It’s meant to refelect the differing levels of play.
Each major league team has one affiliated team at each level, and two teams at the class A-level (high and low, as **BobT ** reported. Players generally start at the lower levels and work their way up.
Some of the A leagues are “short season” leagues. They don’t start until late June. It’s a league generally staffed of players who have just finished high school and are beginning their professional careers. Player’s coming out of college will typically start at AA, although it’s not a hard and fast rule.
Also, the OP asked “Do they get a big phat bonus if they’re bumped up to the majors for a couple games?”. The answer is yes. Players on a major league roster earn at least the minimum salary for each day of service, which for 2005 is approximately $1736 per day. That’s 6 times the daily minimum for AAA. They also accrue credit towards the MLB pension for each day of service.
Minor league players who have six years of experience can become free agents, and many off them sign “split” contracts. That calls for them to make a certain salary if they are on the major league roster, and a lesser salary (but significantly more than the minor league minimum) if they are on a minor league roster. When you see guys who are 28 (or 34!) playing triple-A baseball, they’re making serious money.
I think he was referring to free minor leagues, as opposed to the wholly-owned subsidiaries we have now.
Sorry, I meant to “there were many many more minor leagues”.
Good point. Seventeen leagues now seems like a lot, but at their peak in 1949, the minors consisted of 59 different leagues. In that season, there were 448 minor league teams.
As for **furt’s ** comment, minor league teams haven’t been owned by their parent clubs since 1978. The PBA in 1990 shifted most of the financial burden to the minor league clubs. Player development is still the primary objective, but I think that the affiliated minor league teams are more independent now than they’ve ever been.
anson , what I think the OP (and now me) want to know is, exactly how serious are we talking?
How much would, say, a decent but still only a prospect high schooler make in A ball?
How about someone who’s regularly, but not spectacularly, moved up and is just starting AAA ball?
Or a long-term player who’s played a few very short stints in the majors, but never quite caught on?
SHOW US THE MONEY , BABY!
I doubt many career AAA guys make six-figure salaries. That would eat up a lot of the payroll for one AAA team.
Many career AAA guys will try to ply their trade in Japan because they will get something close to an MLB salary and they get to play more.
$1050 to $1250 per month. See BobT’s link or here.
This may create an exaggerated impression of minor-league poverty. If the player were anything more than “decent”, he probably would have earned a signing bonus (anywhere from a few thousand to a few million) along with his first contract and the salary will be almost meaningless in comparison.
$1500 to $2000 per month. As above.
At least $50,000 per year; possibly much more if the player had established enough value to negotiate a better contract. In an extreme case, Charlotte Knights catcher Ben Davis will earn $1 million this year. The White Sox offered him a guaranteed contract but then decided they didn’t want to keep him on their major league roster. (He could have refused to accept a minor league assignment and voided the contract, but didn’t have enough confidence in his earning power elsewhere.)
They’re operationally independent, but not independent at all from a player development standpoint. Players are still scouted, signed, and paid by the major league parent clubs.
A top prospect would have received a sizable signing bonus with his first contract. Jeff Niemann, first round pick of Tampa Bay last summer, signed a 5 year $5.2 million contract. $3.2 million of that was a signing bonus.
Some veteran major leaguers who sign split contracts with MLB teams do make low six figures in triple-A. These are generally players with significant big league experience, and players that the parent club expects will spend some time on the major league roster during the season. Out of the 700 players at AAA, there are probably a dozen in this category… guys like Brian Daubach.
In any given season there are roughly 3500 players in the minor leagues, and there are probably less than 50 with these huge contracts from the draft, and maybe a dozen or with big split contracts. The vast majority of the players making their way through the ranks make the type of average salaries that have been previously posted.