A Solution to Revitalize a Timeless Pastime
Outline
Introduction
Thesis Statement: In the MiLB, the effects it has on society does more harm than good as it harms the people involved in the business and the players who play in it even though there is an obvious solution to fix the problem for both sides.
1. Background of Baseball and the MiLB
A. History of Baseball
B. History of the Minor Leagues (MiLB)
C. Application of the Minor Leagues (MiLB)
11. Effects of the MiLB on society
A. Business effects: (Team owners and affiliates)
1. Positive: bigger player pool (more prospects), more avenues for financial gain
(more teams), save more money with less investments in MiLB
2. Negative: Loss of prospects (financial reasons), lack of talent at the major league
level, loss of potential revenue due to poor performing teams in both the MLB and MiLB.
B. Effects on the Consumer (Players)
l. Positive: they can play the game they love as their job, traveling
2. Negative: separated from their family for most of the year, lots of players live in poverty, having to get another job in the offseason or quit baseball due to financial reasons.
111. Solution for the MLB
A. Business (Team owners and affiliates)
1. Invest more money and actually care about the players and the teams in the MiLB
B. Consumer (Players)
1. Players can focus strictly on the game and not worry about their finances (leads to
better players and overall better teams at the highest level. Which also means more money for the owners).
Conclusion
Restated Thesis: As one can see, if owners invest more money into the MiLB, they can avoid all of the hassle that they and the players face while also making more money in the process.
Call to Action: By investing money and time into the minor leagues, not only does it positively affect the baseball economy, but also the well-being and popularity of the sport. Caring for the MiLB teams will lead to a revival in the interest of the game in the younger generation and even in international places that are foreign to the great game of baseball.
Student Name
Prof Hamilton
ENGL-1302-72000
12 October 2022
A Solution to Revitalize a Timeless Pastime
Baseball is known my many as “America’s pastime.” The concept of the sport was created in 1845 by a man named Alexander Joy Cartwright. He and his colleagues would go on to create the first baseball team named the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. He would then go on to create the rules and regulations of the game that still stand in today’s version of baseball. The sport would go in popularity over time until people decided to create a league for the best of the best in the sport to compete against each other.
Background of Topic
In October of 1903, the Major League Baseball Association (MLB) was born. Like in modern times, there were two leagues (American and national) and the best teams from each league would go on and face each other in the World Series for a chance to be considered the best in the sport. Throughout the years, the number of teams at the major league level expanded with expansion teams such as the Kansas City Royals in 1969, Texas Rangers in 1972, Seattle Mariners in 1977, and many more. Also, there were teams who had name changes and relocated over the years with teams like the San Francisco Giants who started in New York, the Atlanta Braves who started in Boston, the Washington Nationals who started in Montreal, and others. Today, the game is as popular as it’s ever been with a whopping 30 teams in the major leagues, not including the minors.
The Minor League Baseball Association (MiLB) was created on September 9, 1901, by a team of Minor League executives. A man by the name of Patrick T. Powers was elected as the first president of The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues which is what the MiLB was called at the time. According to the official Minor League Baseball website, there was “Fourteen leagues and 96 clubs were members during the first season in 1902.” Then, “By the time Powers left office in 1909, there were 35 leagues and 246 clubs.” Today, there are 120 official minor league teams that span across the United States, Canada, and the Dominican Republic. The goal of the MiLB is to use train those players they have in the minors to turn them into the best athlete possible to help their team at the MLB level. They accomplish this having those players duke it out against other organizations minor league teams and they promote players based on their performance at their specific level. They can be moved up if they are exceeding expectations, moved down if underperforming, or be stuck due to good but not great results. To restate, they go through all this trouble to weed out the best players and bring them up to the big leagues in order to build the best team possible at the highest level so they can go on to win the World Series at the end of the season. While this system sounds like a nice, competitive system, there are some glaring flaws.
For kids who love to play baseball, the universal ultimate goal is to play at the highest level which is the MLB. However, to get there, they have to go through the MiLB and its various levels. Specifically, they have to go from Single-A to High-A, to Double-A, then to Triple-A. Only once they reach Triple-A do they have the chance to squeak into the forty-man roster at the MLB. To summarize the MiLB experience in a couple of words it would be a hellish grind. While the intricacies of the MiLB look and seem solid on the surface, the actual experiences that the players face to even get an inning of playing time at the MLB is insane. The only reason the players put up with these issues is because of their drive and desire to play the sport they love at the highest level.
Effects of Topic
In the MiLB, the effects it has on society does more harm than good as it harms the people involved in the business and the players who play in it even though there is an obvious solution to fix the problem for both sides.
In the minor leagues, the people who own and run the teams are the same people who own the major league team. For example, the owner of the MLB team Cardinals also owns every minor league team in the Cardinals’ system. With these extra teams to deal with as the owner of a franchise, there comes positives and negatives. The biggest positive would be the revenue that these extra teams bring in to add on to the revenue received from the team in the major leagues. The more teams, the more games that are played which means that more people go to those games and spend money at the ballpark and generate more revenue for the owners. Another positive is with more MiLB teams there are more roster spots open in what they call the “farm system.”
Specifically, there are more players at their owner’s deposal which gives them more of a chance to find their next superstar at the MLB level. One last positive to owners is that when they choose to not invest that much money in the MiLB teams, they can save tons of money because they will still get revenue and therefore become richer from the MiLB teams over the course of a season. However, the biggest loss that would happen as a result of a tiny budget in the MiLB is that those prospects would lose them due to lack of financial aid they receive. According to ESPN writer Joon Lee, “most minor leaguers will make between $8,000 and $14,000” a season which also according to Lee is way below what American’s need to make a year ($26,225) in order to accommodate for their basic needs. With this little pay, players are forced to quit due to the poor living conditions they have to face as a result.
For example, Garrett Broshius, a writer on the lives of minor league players, “describes a common scene of empty McDonald’s bags lying around an apartment that is overcrowded with minor league players.” Players sometimes even live host families who take them in during the regular season. One final negative to note, is that those players that do stay even with the harsh conditions they live with, their play diminishes due to poor living conditions, poor diet, and a lack of access to proper and consistent training. With all of these negatives, the owners actually lose more revenue than they do when they are saving money as they lose out on multiple different ways to earn more money by caring for the MiLB organizations. The owners though, are not the only ones who are negatively affected by their decisions.
Like the owners, the players in the MiLB are also greatly affected by the decisions of the owners. The key difference between the owners and the players is that the players do not have a say in what the owners decide to do. A positive that the players have going for them is that they get to play the sport they love full time and as their primary occupation. By getting to play, they also get to travel to tons of different stadiums and cities that they would not have ever been too otherwise. However, these positives pale in comparison to the struggles an average minor league player face. First off, the players are separated from their loved ones from March to as far as November if one’s team goes to the World Series. If one’s team does not make the playoffs, they get to see their family at the beginning of October. Another, more dire con is very miniscule salary. As stated earlier, players only make anywhere from 8,000 dollars to 14,000 dollars over the course of a season. This means that players usually have to get a side job during the offseason in order to meet their already impoverished standard of living. According to Dirk Hayhurst, a writer for Bleacher Report, states that in the locker rooms there are sign-up sheets for things called “player appearances.” “They usually include things like speaking engagements at local schools, signings at grocery stores, meet-and-greets with the mascot at a car dealership, etc.” Also, if a player is “In High-A ball, you’ll earn anywhere from $50 to $ 100 a pop, depending on whether you have to give a speech.” If a player does not earn enough money, they may even be forced to retire in order to be able to be financially stable. In short, the players live in poverty with little opportunities to make a decent wage which can and does force players to leave the game entirely. Owners are able to get away with down paying their players like that because according to Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post, “Minor league players are not protected from wage fixing by the Curt Flood Act.” This means that the owners can make the players wages lower without any sort of punishment from the government. Even though these situations are serious on both sides of the business, there is an obvious solution that can fix every problem that has been listed thus far.
Solutions to The Effects
The best way to solve both the owner’s and player’s problems would be for the owners to invest more capital into the minor league teams and players. By giving the teams more money, they could hire better quality coaches, get the best training equipment, and even be able to give players a food allowance. Doing this would allow the players to focus more on the game and honing their skills instead of figuring out how to pay they are going to pay their bills for the month. As a result, the quality of the farm system will rise as those players get better and better being able to practice daily without distraction. Getting better players mean that the teams will perform better which directly leads into more ticket sales and more people at the ballpark. Also, having better prospects also means being able to build a better MLB roster and generate more success and revenue at the big leagues. Lastly, along with all of the positives listed the owners and the players will both get paid more. Owners will get more due to more ticket and ballpark accessories sales due to better performing teams and players will get paid more because they are playing well at the higher levels which earns them a massive pay day once they reach the big leagues.
As one can see, if owners invest more money into the MiLB, they can avoid all of the hassle that they and the players face while also making more money in the process. Paying the teams and players more is a benefit for both sides by making the owners richer and helping out the players and their families get by and even have a new life if that player goes on to the big leagues and signs a multi-million-dollar contract. Also, by investing money and time into the minor leagues, not only does it positively affect the baseball economy, but also the well-being and popularity of the sport. Caring for the MiLB teams will lead to a revival in the interest of the game in the younger generation and even in international places that are foreign to the great game of baseball. At the end of the day, the way the game gets the most revenue is to stay prevalent. Everybody knows who Lebron James is or Tom Brady, but people do not know the names of baseball like they do in football or basketball. By investing into their farm systems and into the game as a whole, the talent ceiling will grow higher, and the players will become more popular to the common sports fan with the increased budget allowing for other things like better branding and advertisement. In short, staying relevant means more revenue for everybody involved.
Works Cited
Broshuis Garrett, Low-Wage Life Failure Love of the Game Low-Wage Mindset Emotions
Sports Mindset, Minor League Pay, source, date,
Hayhurst Dirk, An Inside Look into the Harsh Conditions of Minor League Baseball, Bleacher
Report, 14 May 2014, < https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2062307-an-inside-look-into-the-harshconditions-of-minor-league-baseball.>
Janes Chelsea, Why minor league players are still allowed to make so little, The Washington
Post, 16 July 2021,
Lee Joon, Can a union fix this? Minor leaguers say poverty-level pay, poor housing are driving a
‘mental health crisis’, ESPN, 30 September 2021, < https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/ /id/32172108/can-union-fix-minor-leaguers-say-poverty-levelpay-poor-housing-driving-mental-health-crisis>.
MiLB.com, The History & Function of Minor League Baseball, Minor League Baseball, 2
February 2015, < http://origin.milb.com/milb/history/general history.jsp.>
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