All the outside commentators are treating this as a fait accompli. Certainly the league will deny, deny, deny right up until the day they have cashed the checks from the expansion owners. Probably there will be an announcement this summer with teams starting as soon as 2024.
The minor leagues are insanely exploitative. Certainly they can be cheap for fans, but the wages they pay the players is well below minimum wage and should probably be outlawed. In order to make these teams sustainable businesses they need a major overhaul. There’s not much chance that happens without adding costs to the fans. In many towns seeing a minor league baseball game is half the cost of going to see a movie at a theater. That’s simply not sustainable.
“Most Minor Leaguers make less than $15,000 per year and won’t receive their next paycheck until April,” Marino said. “For the next six months, they will spend hours each day training - as required by contract - while trying to balance second and third jobs to make ends meet. Like housing six players in a two-bedroom apartment, this is a broken model from a bygone era. Minor leaguers will not rest until they receive the livable annual salary they deserve.”
Minor league players saw weekly minimum salary increases at each level this year. Players at Class A saw a bump from $290 to $500; Double-A players jumped from $350 to $600; and Triple-A players had salaries increase from $502 to $700.
“Most Minor Leaguers make less than $15,000 per year and won’t receive their next paycheck until April,” Marino said. “For the next six months, they will spend hours each day training - as required by contract - while trying to balance second and third jobs to make ends meet. Like housing six players in a two-bedroom apartment, this is a broken model from a bygone era. Minor leaguers will not rest until they receive the livable annual salary they deserve.”
Indianapolis is pretty much just a football town at this point. They’ll only support a team if it’s doing well. Basketball is the state sport, but the Pacers are dead-last in NBA attendance. They do have one of the most amazing minor-league baseball fields, though, in Victory Field. It’s about 30 years old, though, and would need to be torn down and rebuilt with much, much higher seating capacity if Indy got a major-league team-- it only seats about 13K, while the smallest major-league field seats 25K.
You know, I’m right there with you. It’s probably like the Brady retirement thing; “It’s not official until I say it is! Even though I’ve already decided.”
The most interesting question will be if there’s 1 new team in Seattle or if there’s 2 new teams, one in Seattle and one in Vegas. If there’s a 3rd suitor to compete with Vegas for the second spot things could get fun for a while.
I feel like this undersells it. You can’t make a living working at McDonalds either…but McDonalds in my city pays more than twice what these guys earn and that’s year round. And McDonalds employees aren’t expected to stay in peak physical form, keep a bunch of specialized equipment or travel on a near daily basis.
Athletes and inflammatory pundits like to throw around the term slavery when they like to criticize the owners or the league. But this shit is straight-up indentured servitude.
You’re right. It does undersell it. It’s insane what is expected of these people, and what little they get out of it.
Another thing that you don’t hear about very much is that being an athlete is expensive. I was listening to local talk radio recently, and they had a former Seahawk as a guest host on one show. They were talking about the MLB lockout, and the negotiations, and how some people criticize the players as being rich people paid to play a game and striking over wanting to be paid even more. One thing he pointed out is that when he played football, he paid out of his pocket for a lot of his training, as well as a nutritionist, perhaps a mental conditioning expert. Not all of it, at least in the NFL your team has trainers and facilities and pays for what you eat while at the training center. But in the offseason if you sit on your couch and watch TV for months, you’re out of a job. For most of the year, that’s out of your pocket. Consider having to do that while making much less than minimum wage.
At the bare minimum…I doubt the Minor League clubs even have fully stocked weight rooms. These guys are probably working out at Planet Fitness.
I seem to recall that it was a trend on social media for Minor League players to post photos of the “meals” that were provided for them on the road. It would make a inner city lunch lady blush.
They’re no angels at the end of the day, but the Royals are working to make the lives of their minor leaguers better (though it’s still only comparatively so). When teams were laying staff and minor leaguers off in 2020, the Royals committed to paying their full (miserly) salaries and stipends. They’re also working on vastly improving their living arrangements at the spring training location, with a focus on the minor leaguers, since there’s been a bigger push for extended Spring Training for the minor leaguers. The amount they’re spending is…not enormous, certainly by Scherzer-contract standards. I hope it gives them a real scouting advantage when fringe players have a choice as to who to sign with.
Particularly in the lower levels of the minors, it’s very common for the farm teams to recruit “host families” to help provide their underpaid players with living arrangements and meals.
The situation is exacerbated further by the fact that many young ballplayers are from Latin America and the Caribbean, and may speak little or no English.
If you’re looking for a really good baseball movie but ALSO wanted to be really depressed, then I highly recommend “Sugar”. It’s about a Latin American player who gets signed for pennies, has an extremely hard time integrating into the US, falls for a PED scam, and is chewed up by the system.
why is Montreal even in a conversation for a new team? I remember in the 80s-90s when the dodgers would go there and you’d see triple-digit if you were lucky but mostly double and sometimes even single-digit numbers of fans and they usually were ex-pats rooting for the visiting team
Montreal is a big market and the Expos were a dreadfully run team - they made the playoffs once in 35 years and only because of the 1981 strike - in a disaster of a stadium. (In and around 1981 their attendance was way above average.) I am the biggest baseball fan I’ve ever met and if I lived across the street from Stade Olympique I would not have taken tickets for free. It was horrifically ugly and uncomfortable.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. There’s a pretty decent list of sports cities that quit on a shitty organization until it left or folded only to come back and support a new team well a few years
(or decades) later. Heck, one of the cities likely getting a new NBA team fit that description.
cringing as I realize the Expos left 20!! years ago
I’m not sure how one could watch modern sports, and think the issue is not enough talent to go around. Baseball (and I assume other sports too) has a problem that the talent is so good that it is breaking the game. The current rules aren’t really designed for every pitcher to throw 95 with movement, every batter able to hit the ball 450 feet, and every defender able to catch everything in between. So from that standpoint I’m very much in favor of expansion. I don’t think it would make a huge difference, but it might slow down the growth of three true outcomes baseball a bit.
And I tend to agree with RickJay that big markets can support more teams, but there are lots of other markets which would do okay. I think crime will be a dealbreaker for Mexican/Caribbean markets, but Portland, Charlotte, would work. Then again I think the argument that baseball lacks parity is nonsense. Every team can compete in baseball and in fact almost all teams have been in the playoffs in the last decade. Payroll does not equal success, but more importantly payroll does not equal market size. Just because the Pirates don’t spend money doesn’t mean they can’t. The Cardinals market isn’t all that different and they are the most successful team in national league history.
The argument that certain cities can’t support teams, which has been mentioned a couple times here, I find particularly irksome. As if an owner just needed to show up with crap and have flocks of fans shell out thousands of dollars. The Expos so poorly supported their fans, that they weren’t even on English radio at the end. The owner tried to get his team eliminated for a payday. Why would fans support that team?
That owner of course moved on the Marlins, a case study on how to alienate your fan base. They won a World Series and then dumped all of their talent because they were too short-cited to understand that building a fan base takes time. And then they did it again. Ownership repeatedly lied to the city to get them to build a stadium for them and once it was completed, guess what did? Dumped all their talent once more. Now Jeter is leaving because reportedly the team doesn’t want to spend more money. I do not know if Miami is a good baseball market. I do know that they have a team that has treated them so badly that the relationship will take decades to repair.