Inside baseball

I recently learned something about our producer, Peter Ballon on Rosen. He grew up in Rochester, New York, a city that had not one, not two, not three, not four minor league sports teams. We had five minor league sports teams. What? Yeah. Why? I don't know, Rochester, New York. We had basketball. We had hockey. We had lacrosse. We had soccer. And of course, we had baseball. Yeah! Yeah! Baseball was definitely the most popular one in town. So you feel like a connection to the minor leagues? Oh, for sure. I mean, we went, we would go every summer at least. Zup. Hey. Peter actually called his sister Marissa recently to talk about the Red Wings, their minor league baseball team. I did. Roger's at Red Wings, definitely. There's a special place for them in my heart. Why? Because they chose me to go down during like the seventh inning stretch. Red Wings games are super fun. In between innings, they'd have competitions on the field. Kids would compete for who could throw the most balls into a crate. Set, throw! Or have a dance off of Spikes, the team's big red bird mascot. Go Spikes, go! In this one night, I'm in elementary school. My sister's in middle school. And they chose her to compete. She was stoked. Like, this doesn't happen to you. Not at a Roger's or Red Wings game, but it happened to me. Okay. Marissa and two other girls were going to go on the field and race while holding trays loaded with big fake sandwiches. Whoever won without dropping any would get a prize. So I'm like, oh, I'm winning this. And I got in the lead. I like circle around the mascot spikes. And I won! Yeah. She smoked those other girls. So I won a Rochester Red Wings hat that I still wear to this day signed by Spikes. You still wear it? It still fits your head? Of course. Wow. Did they give you a big hat or you just have a small head? The Red Wings were a constant in our lives. My sister had birthday parties there. I'd go with friends during the summer and load up on fried dough. My friend down the street, his brother was a bat boy. Then he was two. So fast forward to today. I've still got a soft spot for minor league baseball. The Red Wings, by the way, at the time were a feeder team for the Minnesota Twins. And so actually, Chrissy, I was really interested in that labor relationship, like what the job looks like for guys working their way toward another job. So I started talking to people in the minor league baseball world. And what did you find out? Well here on the uncertain hour, we like to explore obscure policies and forgotten histories and how they shape the rules in America, right? And honestly, the more I learned about minor league baseball, the more it seemed like I was pulling back the curtain on some really convoluted and really ugly labor practices when it came to pay. In baseball. Mm-hmm. We're talking about wages that don't even meet minimum wage thresholds. The amount that we do get paid is so small, it's truly baffling. Between three and five dollars an hour, I'd say. It was their way of saying that it's not really a job, so they shouldn't have to treat you like an employee. Welcome to the uncertain hour. I'm Chrissy Clark. And I'm Peter Ballin on Rosen. On this episode, the story of how an industry can remake our country's laws to their liking. All the things we've been talking about in this series so far, companies and industries maneuvering around basic worker protections, all of that was silently playing out at those minor league baseball games Peter went to. Our national pastime has a complicated history when it comes to labor, and it raises these questions like, is some unpaid labor okay if you're following your passion? And how easily can special interests just rewrite our laws? That's what we're looking at today. How professional baseball, as an industry, has used the law to get around things most workers take for granted, like the minimum wage and overtime. It's a story with some big winners, some big losers, and people paying a big price to pursue a dream. Here's Peter again. If we think about baseball as a workplace, you gotta understand the company layout. The players I watched growing up, they wore Rochester Red Wings jerseys, but they were technically employees of the Minnesota Twins. Players signed a contract with one of major league baseball's 30 franchises, like the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees. Then the MLB and those franchises assigned guys out to where they'll actually play. I am an employee of the Cardinals, but I'm doing work for whatever team it is that I'm on. This is right handed pitcher number 31, Anthony Xu. He's the type of guy who makes a good athlete, confident, quietly driven. For him, it all started a few weeks after he graduated from his college baseball team. Anthony was out getting ice cream with his girlfriend when he got a phone call. It was a man who said he had good news. The St. Louis Cardinals want to offer you a signing bonus and have you on a contract. And I said, yes, absolutely. And he said, awesome, you'll get a plane ticket in your email and it'll be to Johnson City, Tennessee and off you go. Anthony was being hired by the St. Louis Cardinals. He would start as a player for the minor league Johnson City Cardinals. It was a pretty quick moment of, yes, and then, okay, I gotta get in the car so I can get down to catch the flight. And so you said they offered you a signing bonus. How big was your bonus? After taxes, I got 600 bucks in my bank account. 600 bucks. The top draft pick that year saw a $6 million signing bonus. But Anthony's 600 bucks is more typical for players in the later rounds. Even with my baseball scholarship, I was finishing school and I knew I had a lot of debt. So I just went ahead and put it on my loan. Like right immediately? Yeah, there went my 600 bucks. The contract Anthony signed is called the Minor League Uniform Players Contract. It's the exact same for every player. Everyone signs to a team for seven seasons and they all make the same salary at first. The only thing that sets guys apart, their signing bonus. Everybody in baseball kind of knows that minor league baseball players don't get paid that much, but it can't be all that bad, right? When Anthony got to Tennessee, the team set him up to stay with a host family, this recognition that minor league players might not make enough to house themselves. And Anthony got to work. On a typical day, he'd show up at the field hours before the game for team warm-ups, pitching practice, batting practice, weight training. Then he'd play the actual game. Following that, he'd shower, grab a bite to eat, then leave the stadium. We're usually there from 2pm-ish to midnight-ish. Yeah. So that's like a 10-hour workday pretty much. And we play every single day, so it's going to be seven days a week. No weekends. Historically, just one required off-day each month. And no overtime. No matter how many hours Anthony worked, his pay would be the same. A couple weeks in, Anthony got back to the locker room. And there was an envelope waiting for him. It doesn't say pay stub on it or anything, it just looks like an envelope. So you pick it up, open it up, net pay, 4.25-ish. And then somebody whose mom was an accountant or something, oh, my mom's told me about that, net pay is what shows up in your bank account. Okay, thanks dude. Turn around and kind of start to stare at it some more. Okay, so 4.25, that's what I got. Let's see, so this was for 14 games. And I was here from like 2pm to midnight every day. And I got 425 dollars. Is this missing a zero maybe? More guys come into the clubhouse behind you and everybody starts looking around and we're like. We know what we signed for, but this just got really, really real. Anthony says before taxes, his bi-weekly paycheck was around 500 bucks. He did the math, less than 4 dollars an hour. But it was a contract every minor league player signed. The amount that we do get paid is so small that it's truly baffling. Consider this. The most profitable poverty line for an individual is a yearly income of about $13,000. There are a few different levels of the minors, but players at the lowest level made till recently about $3,500 a year, less than a third of what someone living at the poverty line would make. Now the closer you get to the major is the more money you get, but almost all players can make poverty level wages. One big reason annual salaries are so low, players only get paid when games happen during the season. This is number 27 left-handed pitcher Mitch Horacek. He was with the Minnesota Twins organization when we spoke. Today he's a free agent. Teams put players up in a hotel, provide some food, but they don't pay guys. This daily stipends for meals. Mitch says his first season, it was $10 a day. So for minor league players, low pay in general, no overtime no matter how many hours you work, and you only get paid during the season, despite spring training and fall instructional leagues in other months. During most of the off season between September and April, players aren't working with their teams. They're expected to train and stay in shape. So without a paycheck, some guys pick up second and third jobs, like Mitch's friend. He says, inevitably, people would ask if he drives full time and he'd say, no, actually I'm a baseball player. There's a moment where people are a little bit baffled. Yeah, but you're driving my Uber. What do you mean you're a professional athlete? Well, sir, I make about 400 bucks every two weeks and that's only half the year. But isn't that like a multi-billion dollar industry? Yeah, and I have skills that only .0001% of people have in a multi-billion dollar industry, but the economics of it don't work out apparently. The MLB makes over $10 billion in revenue annually. But guys I spoke to said their experiences and the miners felt alien from that. There's tons of money floating around everywhere except for the minor leagues. The level that you're at as a baseball player starts to become how you're treated as a person really. For Anthony and other guys, it was fast food on the road because he can't afford anything else. He could afford two, three, four, five other guys in two bedroom apartments just to make rent and skimping on things that would keep their bodies in top condition like an actual bed. It was almost a trope how many times people nonchalantly mentioned air mattresses. Three full seasons I slept on an air bed. I had a mattress that was on the floor. Four guys and I think a two bedroom apartment just sleeping on air mattresses. Airbags on the floor. This is Eduardo Navas from Venezuela. He's number 17, a minor league catcher for the New York Yankees organization. He says he's living on even less than some other teammates. When I get the paycheck, the house my paycheck is going to my home. Half half your paycheck. He sends half his paycheck to family in Venezuela. 30% almost one in three professional baseball players are born outside the US. MLB allows franchises to sign foreign players as early as age 16. Eduardo says since he sends money home, he'll bunk up with seven other guys to afford rent. When you're living with these other guys, how many other guys from Latin America are sending money home? Everyone. Everyone does. Yeah, you heard him laugh. Seemed obvious to him. Eduardo says the wages and lifestyle aren't what he imagined when he was drafted, but he's just got to push through. And that's something players from the US also told me. Like this one guy who worked as a janitor in the off season, he said minor league life was about paying your dues, hoping you get called up to the big leagues, where players make a minimum of $570,000 a year. He just like. Eduardo says that's just life. Baseball is like any job where you got to work for a promotion. Baseball is just being a job. Well most jobs pay the minimum wage here in the States. Yeah, it's true. Do you ever wonder why it's like this? I never want to get to that point asking to the team like why you pay us this much. Does that feel like a dangerous thing to do? Yeah, I don't see nobody else asking that. I want to be the first guy to ask that. People are afraid. People are afraid of getting released for speaking out. Mitch Horacek, the pitcher, says a big part of this, no union. Major league players have one. Major league players have one. But minor leaguers have never unionized. Mitch says players can think the minors are just a stop on the way to the majors. They don't want to rock the boat. You know, if there's guys who are saying, you know what, this is the minor leagues, you're playing a game, you don't deserve to be making the big bucks. What do you say to them? I say to them that this is this is a job like any other. You know, it's a fun job. It is a job playing a game, but it is still a job. It is still work. And so that work needs to be compensated. Plus team owners and the MLB are certainly making money. So why do minor league players make such minor league wages? Well, there's another factor wrapped up in this, that baseball as an industry actually rewrote federal law so they can pay players in ways that would be against the law for most other businesses. It's somewhat despicable. That's after the break. So in minor league baseball, we have a workforce with no overtime, working part of the year for super low wages, lower than other minor league sports, and doing other work for no pay. How is this even legal? It actually comes down to four big reasons. Four loopholes in federal law that baseball as an industry has either latched onto or created on their own. Our first loophole is this quirk of history involving a strange Supreme Court ruling, and it helps us understand why the MLB can offer such low wages to minor league players in the first place. Let's take a trip back. Take Me Out to the Ball Game was written in the early 1900s. The original lyrics are about a woman named Katie who is obsessed with baseball. She tells her boyfriend she'll only go out with him if he takes her out to a ball game. So it's the early 1900s. Baseball is solidifying itself in pop culture, and this lawsuit is working its way up to the Supreme Court. The American and National Leagues, the leagues that make up major league baseball, had been aggressively buying up teams and driving smaller leagues out of business. The question the Supreme Court has about the Supreme Court rules that the Sherman Antitrust Act does not apply to major league baseball. Catherine Waldens, an American Studies professor at Notre Dame University, and teaches about the history of professional baseball. She says it went down like this. The justices said that the Supreme Court has to be the only way to make sure that the Supreme Court rules that the Supreme Court rules that the Sherman Antitrust Act does not apply to major league baseball. Catherine Waldens, an American Studies professor at Notre Dame University, said the Federal Sherman Antitrust Act, which says you can't do things like monopolize an industry, only applied to interstate commerce. They narrowly defined commerce at the time to mean the production or distribution of physical goods. So even though teams traveled since baseball games were these ephemeral things that only happened in a single state at a time. In 1922, the justices said major league baseball isn't subject to antitrust law. So the leagues which formed major league baseball were handed their first huge loophole. They were deemed exempt from federal law, which prevents monopolies, a precedent still on the books. And if you're a legal monopoly, you don't have to compete with other businesses for workers with special skills and offer higher wages, which brings us to a guy named Branch Ricky, probably best known for signing Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers. But before that, in the thirties, Branch Ricky managed the St. Louis Cardinals and he popularized the idea of the farm system where you grow and develop future talent. And so that's where we start to see more of a hierarchical system develop. He said, what if we sign hundreds of players for kind of cheap, keep them in our own lower leagues and just promote the best ones as needed? If you can maximize your efficiency and optimize your labor pipeline, you're going to do it. That's how capitalism works. Right. It's vertical integration where a company owns all levels of the supply chain, almost like it's straight from the books of Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Except Standard Oil and other old monopolies were broken up by antitrust laws. But not MLB, they're exempt. So while there are plenty of tech firms to hire programmers and law firms to hire lawyers, it's just MLB and its teams to hire professional baseball players. And MLB can legally get 30 teams, all these employers in a single industry, to offer the same low wages to entry level workers. Anywhere else that be wage fixing. So loophole number one, a legally sanctioned monopoly with deflated wages. Eventually, people were like, fine, you got your monopoly, but you got to at least pay minimum wage in overtime, right? And MLB was like, actually, no, which brings us to loophole number two. The seasonal employment loophole. If your category of employment falls under seasonal employment or entertainment, you are not eligible for those kinds of labor protections. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which lays out things like minimum wage in overtime, covers most, but not all, employees. Catherine Walden says it's this loophole written right into federal law. You don't have to pay minimum wage or overtime. If you're a seasonal amusement or recreational establishment that operates less than seven months a year. Basically, if you're a summer camp, you won't have to pay counselors time and a half for overnight shifts or pay teen lifeguards extra for working long shifts at a pool. Jobs often held by teens looking for extra cash, not trying to make a living. But MLB and its teams latched onto this saying, hey, we have a season. We're exempt from minimum wage in overtime, too. It's not just minor league players. It's Batboys. It's maintenance workers. In the 90s, Batboys sued the Detroit Tigers, saying they weren't paid minimum wage. A district court said, well, baseball is a seasonal business. Sorry, Batboys don't qualify for that. But not all courts agreed. When maintenance workers with the Cincinnati Reds sued for overtime pay. In 1998, a court did something new. They took the workers side against the MLB team. The courts looked at this and said, no, you don't qualify for that exemption. You're doing stuff throughout the year. You need to be complying with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Garrett Brushhouse is a lawyer and minor league player advocate. Before law school, he spent six years as a minor league pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. I was excited to talk to him because he knows a lot about various lawsuits concerning baseball. Well, it's so interesting to me that like, OK, so there has been kind of these cases moving through, looking at people within the baseball world, but not necessarily the players themselves. Yeah, you know, to my knowledge, the case that our firm brought us is the first one that's applied your basic minimum wage laws to players themselves. In 2014, Garrett did something unprecedented. He filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of former minor league players. Thousands of guys who passed through the minors who said they weren't paid for spring training and fall instructional leagues and that they made no overtime during the regular season, despite working 50 to 70 hours per week. Just trying to apply your basic wage an hour laws, the same laws that Walmart, McDonald's comply with to minor league baseball players. That lawsuit filed in 2014, which seeks damages for unpaid work and overtime. Still hasn't gone to trial because of appeals. But in the years following the filing of the lawsuit, MLB found a new reason. They said they weren't responsible for minimum wage or overtime, something that may be familiar if you've been listening to this season. Legal loophole number three. They said minor league players aren't actually employees. They try saying that they're trainees instead of employees and shouldn't even be subject to your minimum wage laws. In public statements, MLB said, quote, minor league baseball is not a career, but a short term seasonal apprenticeship. Mark Normandon, a freelance journalist who writes a newsletter about sports and labor. He watched this all play out. It was their way of saying that it's not really a job, so they shouldn't have to treat you like an employee. Whoa, so they're not saying these guys aren't my employees. They're saying these guys are not even employees. Yeah. So when anyone would use an argument of like, well, even someone in the service industry or fast food industry is paid better and treated better, they're like, ah, yes, but that's a job and could be a career. This is not. Well, that's so wild, right? Like if you want to get around workplace protections, what's a better way to do that than just say, wait a minute, this isn't even a job. This isn't even employment. There's no workplace protections if you don't have a workplace, essentially. Now, let's think about some numbers. Professional baseball players spend on average four years in the minors. That's a long time to not be an employee. And only about one in six will ever get called up to the majors. Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that some trainees can be unpaid, but their training has to meet specific requirements like that. The trainee benefits more from the training than the business benefits from their work. It's why we can have unpaid internships. So in a preliminary hearing for Garrett's class action lawsuit of former minor league players, a lawyer for MLB went to that playbook. The lawyer said, quote, our position is that none of them are employees, that they fall squarely within the ambit of a trainee. The lawyer said since Spanish speaking players can take English classes and classes are done to teach players how to open a checking account, that this is training not just for baseball, but for life. And the lawyer said to the extent that any employment relationship may exist. It has to be determined on a case by case basis. And that should prevent Garrett's class action case from moving forward. The courts ultimately rejected that argument. So the baseball industry went looking for a new reason to not pay minimum wage or overtime, one that'd be much more bulletproof, a fourth and final loophole. They set out to rewrite federal law. They form a political action committee and they lobby the US Congress to revise labor law. Catherine Walden, the baseball scholar, says the MLB team owners and minor league baseball bigwigs launched this coordinated effort in direct response to Garrett's class action lawsuit. And if you go through MLB's public lobbying disclosures, which I did, it shows the first half of the 2010s MLB spent an average $430,000 a year on lobbying standard for an organization their size. But then in 2016, as this lawsuit's going through the pipeline, that's spending tripled to $1.3 million in a single year. The same amount in 2017 and 2018. Those three years alone, MLB paid lobbyists almost $4 million total, a $4 million bet they could change the law. In March 2018, Garrett's class action lawsuit was limping along, bogged down by appeals. One Sunday evening, his phone rang. I got a call from a Washington Post reporter asking me, what can you tell me about the Save America's Pastime Act? I said, well, let me call you back. Garrett knew about the Save America's Pastime Act. It was this piece of legislation introduced two years earlier when MLB had started their lobbying effort. It had died in the house. It was an exemption for minor league baseball players from the Fair Labor Standards Act, our country's basic minimum wage law. I'd hope that it was dead. If you remember, the political climate in early 2018 was tense. President Trump and Democrats hit a stalemate over including protections for DACA recipients and government spending. The government shut down. Then the Save America's Pastime Act was back. You know, how it came back to life was it was it was tacked on to page 1,967 of an omnibus spending bill that had to pass Congress four days later in order to keep the government from shutting down. Buried almost 2000 pages into this huge spending bill was a provision that specifically carved out baseball players from minimum wage and overtime laws. It said if players were paid the equivalent of 40 hours a week at the federal minimum wage during the season, they weren't entitled to any other compensation. No overtime and no pay during spring training or the off season. Quote, irrespective of the number of hours the employee devotes to baseball related activities, so as long as MLB paid minor league players $290 a week for five months. Garrett says the Save America's Pastime Act said players had no right to overtime or any other pay during the year. There's nothing about America's past time that was being saved by this. I wanted to know why? Why did anyone think America's past time needed saving? I reached out to MLB and politicians involved with the spending legislation. None agreed to be in the story. So I was shocked when this guy called me back. Our main argument to Congress was you need to pass this because it goes to our survival. Stan Brand was one of the chief architects of the lobbying effort and served as vice president of minor league baseball for 29 years. I got to explain what that means. That's the governing body that oversees the minor leagues and assists with team schedules, merch and ticket sales. It's a separate organization from MLB. Still, major and minor league baseball often have similar interests. By keeping minor league players cheap and heading off this class action lawsuit. There was a concern about, well, you know, what is what is what is time at work? Is extra batting practice work is sitting on the bus to and from a game work is is being in a locker room waiting for the game to start work. You know, if that's if that's time and a half, that could be a lot of money. I mean, some might argue that any time you're doing for the company, yeah, that's that's time you should be getting paid for. That that was what was a dispute in the in the lawsuit. Here's what made Stan really nervous. If players were paid more, they'd be more expensive. So to keep costs down, MLB might not supply players to as many teams, which could mean towns all over the country would no longer have affiliated baseball. Stan, minor league teams were special. They provided jobs for people selling cotton candy and tickets and also pride, a home team to root for. But Stan had a solution to keep things business as usual. The Save America's Pastime Act. If this is a business model that relies on employees who aren't subject to minimum wage and overtime laws, is this a good model? Well, it's a model that existed for, you know, 120 years. But just because this has been around for 120 years, does that mean it's good? I mean, just the right thing. Look, it was good from my perspective in that it fostered survival of these teams and communities. And it's it it fostered the survival of the magic of these the community centered minor league teams. So to that degree, it was a positive to my way of thinking. So Stan, along with the MLB, major minor league team owners and lobbyists, appealed directly to members of Congress and gave lawmakers money to really engage the legislature you needed to be active in the campaign finance area. A person's ability to gain basic labor and employment protections shouldn't be dependent on, you know, their industry's ability to lobby Congress for special treatment. Garrett Brushhouse, the player turned attorney again. It's somewhat despicable. On March 23, 2018, the whole government spending bill, including the Save America's Pastime Act, was passed to keep the government open. Unlike standalone legislation, provisions included in big spending bills aren't sponsored by specific politicians. So it's hard to tell who put it in. I did ask Mitch McConnell's office, but they never got back to me. So MLB was given a federal law specifically saying players are not entitled to overtime or any pay outside the regular season. Mark Normandon, the journalist, says that makes them pretty untouchable. They got Congress to carve out an exception for them to be terrible employers. Like you can just do that. You can just write laws like that. Yeah. I mean, if you've got a few million dollars and know who to give it to, then yeah. In section two, 13 of the Fair Labor Standards Act, there are currently 34 exemptions to either minimum wage protections or overtime rules. Some are broad, like seasonal employees or people employed in a bona fide professional capacity, which is my salaried employees don't get overtime. But then some like baseball are so specific that it makes you scratch your head and think, wait a minute, special interests have got to be behind that. Like how you don't need to be paid minimum wage if you work propagating or harvesting shellfish, or if you're a switchboard operator for a small public telephone company and then written right into federal law. No overtime if you work processing maple sap into syrup or sugar. And then this one, which I didn't know, motion picture theaters aren't required to pay employees overtime. So adding minor league players to that list was a victory for Stan Brand. Still, I wonder if he had anything to say to those players. So I've spoken to a bunch of guys. Guys talked about living on air mattresses who can barely afford Chipotle during their spring training. What message do you have for them for why they should get carved out of these protections that others don't have? I don't wish these people sleep on air mattresses. They're seeking to qualify themselves as the most elite baseball players in the world. You know, any more than a violinist at Juilliard hopes to get on to the New York Symphony someday. That's that's the nature of the the the career of the players that are in the world. The New York Symphony someday. That's that's the nature of the the the career they're pursuing. It's a it's a tryout. It's an apprenticeship. Well, guys are locked into a seven year contract. That's a long time to not be a real employee. No. Well, except very few of them last seven years. Well, just because you're an apprentice or a trainee, should you not get minimum wage or overtime? Well, yeah. I don't I don't know. They weren't getting minimum wage. They weren't getting paid for those extra functions that I mentioned. Well, it's not just sitting on the bus. It's also spring training. Other sorts of trainings during the off season. Yes, some might look at that and say, hey, this is unpaid work. That was there. That was their claim. Do you see spring training as unpaid work? Um, yeah, what mostly it was. And I, you know, I look, I was not an advocate for not paying the minor league players a living wage. I was simply explaining the reality of the current relationship and its impact on the industry. I was honestly kind of shocked to hear him admit, yeah, this is unpaid work. But if we didn't do that, our whole industry would fall apart. Here at Brush House, the player turned attorney. He doesn't buy that. It's a slap in the face to every minor league player out there. We aren't asking for huge sums of money here. A full time minimum wage worker in this country makes around $15,000 a year. A fraction of team profits. In 2019, if MLB teams had paid minor leaders 15 K a year, that would have cost teams about $2 million each. Not much for them. Just 4% of the average $50 million teams made in operating profits that year, a figure that comes from Forbes, which tracks MLB profits. And players like Mitch Horacek, the pitcher, are still trying to wrap their heads around the Save America's Pastime Act. Straight out of 1984, it is double speak. I think it's gross, man. I mean, I think major league baseball, they're just spending millions of dollars to craft the rules to suppress wages on employees that make the least. But there's another wrinkle in all of this, an incentive for teams to keep costs down. You have these owners, these primary owners, but they also sell tons of little and like minority stakes in the team. So any money you don't spend on players is money that can go to these investors. Mark Normandon, the journalist, says in the early aughts, the early 2000s, baseball started becoming this big investment opportunity. All these investors bought into teams, franchise values exploded, which then attracted more investors with everyone expecting a return on investment. So he says professional baseball became even more motivated to keep costs down and preserve their business practices. Can we draw a direct line from kind of this change that happened in the early aughts and this mindset to something like the Save America's Pastime Act? Yeah, yeah, I think it's from that same that same mindset that forces you to look for every possible like efficiency and loophole to save money. Baseball is a sport that's all about tracking analytics. A guy's batting average, pitch velocity, RBI's, then thinking about what could be better. Doesn't seem too far off to take that same mindset to the industry's whole business model. Stan Brandt from Minor League Baseball says, yeah, that's exactly what's happening. You know, old baseball men used to run the game and now, you know, hedge fund investors and Yale economists run the player development side of the game in analytics. The entire focus of the game has changed and the entire focus of the business has changed. Currently, there are drastic changes happening to the minors. The 2020 season was canceled due to the pandemic. And despite the Save America's Pastime Act, which Stan lobbied for under the impression it would save teams, MLB declared they were going to reshape Minor League Baseball, draft fewer players and cut 40 teams. To me, that's a betrayal of R going to Capitol Hill and seeking this amendment. You feel betrayed? Absolutely. Lo and behold, the Save America's Pastime Act passes and the first thing out of the box is a contraction plan. MLB decided rather than dealing with a governing body that represents all of the minors, that they'd signed contracts directly with minor league teams one by one, giving MLB full control over minor league licensing, ticket sales, streaming rights. All the things Stan's office used to do. A few months after we first spoke, he resigned. There was really no, no, nothing left for me to do. So I wondered how Stan felt about carving players out of minimum wage and overtime requirements now. I mean, Save America's Pastime Act was bundled into this huge bill that needed to pass to keep the government open. Was that kind of sneaky? No, it was public. Everyone knew about it. This was just one of hundreds of provisions that was enacted that way. So it was no different than anything else that's occurred in the Congress in the last 20 years. I mean, sitting where you are now, would you do it again? I mean, look, we knew that 40 teams were going to be eliminated. No, probably wouldn't have. Now, everyone I spoke to said the minors weren't working as well as they should. But no one thought less baseball was the solution. Still, when minor league baseball returns, there'll be fewer teams and a shorter schedule for many. Remaining players will get a raise, but Mark Normandon, the writer says it's not that meaningful. So it's about a 50 percent raise, but a 50 percent increase of shit is still shit. All players now make the equivalent of minimum wage during the season. Still, no overtime, no pay during spring training, and many making annual wages below the poverty line. As far as Garrett and the class action lawsuit for former minor league players, Garrett hopes to argue MLB also violated state minimum wage and overtime laws, even if current players are carved out from federal ones. MLB has decided to pay exorbitant amounts to lobbyists and to attorneys rather than treating these players as employees, as they are called on the face of their contract. Baseball is far from alone in crafting laws to legitimize their business practices. Recently, Uber, Lyft, and other gig companies launched the most expensive ballot measure in US history. To convince California voters, app-based drivers shouldn't be covered by state laws that would make them employees, rather than the state-owned companies. That would make them employees rather than independent contractors. Just like baseball, it worked and could send the message to big business. Just do what you've always done. Don't like the laws? Write your own. That story was reported by Peter Ballin on Rosem, one of the producers on our show. That's it for this episode of The Uncertain Hour. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with the last episode in our season. We'll tell some of your stories about working as a non-employee and we'll ride along with an Amazon Flex driver. So they're throwing out like D'Jorno pizzas? Those are stuff that was returned by other drivers. Like if they couldn't deliver it and they bring it back, they throw it out. That's next time on The Uncertain Hour. And if you want to help us with that episode, tell us your story. Have you ever been a non-employee that doesn't get minimum wage or overtime? Or let us know if you've got a question about something you've heard this season or something you want to know more about. Our email is uncertainhour at marketplace.org. Our producers are Caitlyn Esch and Chris Juhlin. Our editor is Catherine Winter. Research and production help from Muna Danish, Daniel Martinez and Marquet Green. Our media producer is Robin Edgar. Our digital team is Tony Wagner, Erica Phillips and Donna Tam. Satara Njavis is the executive director of On Demand at Marketplace. And I'm Chrissy Clark.