BIG-LEAGUE DREAMS BELOW POVERTY LINE
Hopefuls sleep on air mattresses, eat leftover food as MLB faces lawsuit filed by former players claiming salaries violate minimum wage laws, write Kent Babb and Jorge Castillo.
They trickled into the mid-July night, a rain-shortened loss beginning their Friday night early. A 25-year-old catcher hung back.
Matt Pare chatted with teammates and underwent a long treatment session as other Augusta GreenJackets players left the clubhouse. He kept himself awake with a marathon shower.
By the time Pare dressed, he had the clubhouse to himself, along with what was left of the GreenJackets’ post-game buffet.
“What have we got, Sarge?” he called toward clubhouse manager Kristopher Nichols, a former army drill sergeant who appreciates — and usually rewards — Pare’s resourcefulness.
Pare is the oldest player for the San Francisco Giants’ single-A affiliate, and he begins most homestands by waiting out his teammates in order to stockpile free food.
Far away from Major League Baseball’s mighty salaries and Hollywood glitz, Pare is among the thousands of minor leaguers who survive on baseball earnings below the federal poverty line. Baseball has in recent years parlayed renewed popularity into record earnings, leveraging apparel and media demands into $9.5 billion in revenue last year; each of its 30 franchises averaged $23 million in profits in 2015, and many of their minor league affiliates saw attendance figures and team values continue a steady climb.
But the overwhelming majority of players in professional baseball’s extensive player development system never see a cut of that wealth. More than 80 per cent of draft picks will never reach the big leagues, and most live on salaries of less than $10,000 per season; the starting salary for a first-year player, paid only during the regular season, is $1,100.
“You always question yourself: Should I be doing this?” said Pare, who says he’s making about $7,500 in salary during this 22-week season — a little more than $340 a week, or about $8.50 an hour.
Pare shares a two- bedroom apartment with three teammates. He has, in four years as a professional ballplayer, accumulated a mountain of credit card debt.
His experience is typical among players on pro baseball’s ground floor, highlighting that financial struggle is, as much as promo nights and floodlit nostalgia, a minor league tradition. One that might, according to a lawsuit filed against Major League Baseball two years ago, violate federal and state minimum wage laws.
“The organization traces its roots to the nineteenth century,” reads the suit, filed in a California district court and led by 41 former players. “Unfortunately for many of its employees, its wage and labour practices remain stuck there.”
MLB has denied its organizational structure is unlawful and rather provides opportunity to thousands of young athletes who want to make it to the big leagues. Indeed, many players say the sacrifices are worth it.
“In reality I just wanted a chance,” said Wilmer Difo, a Dominican-born player who, before being called up by the Washington Nationals last year, spent five seasons in the minor leagues and spent the majority of the 2013 season sleeping on an air mattress in an apartment with five other players. “That’s everyone’s dream, to get to the major leagues. But it’s not always going to be like that. Not everyone. Unfortunately, not everyone, but there are a lot of people that depend on it anyway.”
Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred indicated to reporters in July that additional regulation could ultimately lead to smaller minor league rosters or fewer teams.
The lawsuit has nonetheless turned a spotlight on a shadowy corner of a game in which players routinely put in 60-hour work weeks and must face continual personal and professional obstacles in the name of chasing a dream.
Athletes from Latin America are particularly at risk. Many come to the United States from impoverished backgrounds with little or no knowledge of English, and lack both the cultural understanding of life in the country and network of family and friends that can help ease the burden. They are guaranteed a salary, health insurance and not much else.
But there are reasons they keep playing: Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw’s $33.8-million annual salary is the game’s richest, and the average major league player earns $4.4 million per season. When the GreenJackets’ season be- gan, their highest salary belonged to Adam Sonabend, an undrafted 24-year-old catcher. His biweekly paycheque, after taxes, is $671.
That’s enough for Sonabend to have his own bedroom, which is more than his three roommates can say. GreenJackets pitchers Michael Connolly and Jake McCasland share a room, and Pare sleeps on a mattress on the dining room floor.
Barb Rothstein used to stay up late after her husband went to bed, opening beers and listening to the young men’s stories.
Barb and Bob invited the first of the players on the Norwich Navigators, at the time a New York Yankees double-A affiliate, to live rentfree in their Connecticut basement in 1996. Two years later, after visiting a few Latin American prospects’ apartment shocking for both its grime and the landlord’s price gouging, there were a dozen players and two wives spread through their house on futons, a mattress in their living room, sharing a room with their son.
“I’m not the warm and fuzzy type,” Barb would say much later. “But there was something about their living situations that I just couldn’t stand.”
Some of the tales common on the minor league circuit are amusing: how smaller prospects sometimes climb into the team bus’s luggage bin to sleep, the way a good meal on the road is a jug of peanut butter before flies or sweaty fingers contaminate it, that it was a good bet the team’s bat boys were paid more per hour than the players.
“I would be very confident to say that anyone working in that stadium was making more than we were, no matter what job they had,” said Brett Newsome, a former Nationals farmhand and one of dozens of current and former minor leaguers interviewed for this story. Newsome is among the co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit against MLB.
Players travel with air mattresses, sometimes the only constant in a life of change, and essentials aren’t easy to come by. One former first-round draft pick said teammates often asked him to “overorder” baseball equipment from sponsors and distribute the extras within the clubhouse.
The Rothsteins, one of many host families who offer housing to minor leaguers, fit dozens of players in their 2,000-square foot house until a few years ago. Barb said they came to love their guests, and when one player moved up the ladder or gave up the dream, another took his place.
In 2008, after the Giants took over the Norwich team, a tall 24-year-old pitcher named Garrett Broshuis moved in. He was from small-town Missouri and bookish, and like Barb, he too collected stories.
Every once in a while, as he and Barb shared a few of their favourites, he’d wonder aloud if the system would ever change.
Broshuis’ office window overlooks downtown St. Louis and the Mississippi River, a wall decorated with reminders of an old life and a new one: his rookie card next to his admittance to the Missouri Bar Association.
“I still love the game,” Broshuis said, though a decade after signing a contract to play professional baseball, he was declaring war on it.
In February 2014, he filed the lawsuit against MLB, its 30 franchises and former commissioner Bud Selig. In it, he referred to the league as a “cartel.”
A former all-American at Missouri, he had tried, years earlier, to keep quiet and play. When he invited his then-girlfriend to his meagre apartment, finding a room flooded by a neighbour’s toilet upstairs, he assured himself brighter days awaited.
As the years passed, the stories ate away at his resolve: the Venezuelan teammate who struggled each month to send $20 back home to his pregnant girlfriend, the young pitchers worrying each month about how they’d pay their student loans.
He was told by team officials that he was lucky to play, that the system had been in place for decades, that if he wanted to make more money, he should get better.
Four days after his final game in 2009, he took the Law School Admission Test and was later accepted into St. Louis University’s law school.
MLB filed an answer to the suit last year, denying the allegations in Broshuis’s complaint. A league spokesman declined an interview request for this story, referring the Washington Post to a June statement comparing players to “artists, musicians and other creative professionals who are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act.”
Pare was living rent-free in a cousin’s spare bedroom last fall when the email arrived: “The purpose of this Notice,” it read, “is to inform you of the existence of a collective action lawsuit against Major League Baseball.”
A group of former minor leaguers had formed a movement against the league, and hundreds more were adding their names.
He thought about it and talked to people he trusted. Pare wondered if, like the 1968 uprising that ultimately led to free agency, a victory here would be good for the game.
And in the end, he couldn’t be certain it would. He believed the Giants and MLB had, all told, been good to him. Around 2,300 current and former players would opt-in on the suit, but Pare would not be one of them.
Last month, a California magistrate judge stripped the suit of its conditional class-action status. A setback, Broshuis admitted, but earlier this month the same judge granted a request to reconsider the class certification; a hearing is scheduled for Dec. 2.
For now, Broshuis and the 41 co-plaintiffs wait, and for different reasons so do the young men in the apartment in west Augusta: Pare increasingly realistic about his baseball fate, Sonabend seeing how a former baseball castaway can climb, Connolly defiantly hopeful that the phone will someday ring.
“It’s only going to be a couple years and you filter out,” Connolly said, “or you get that paycheque everybody dreams about.”
I would be very confident to say that anyone working in that stadium was making more than we were, no matter what job they had.