The Chris Moeller Archives

What do Vermont and Iowa have in common?

Vermont and Iowa are similar in at least three ways. We both have a prominent city called Burlington. We both host lower-development-level, minor league baseball teams. And at least until next month, we’re kind of sharing Bernie Sanders.

These three things coalesced yesterday when the Democratic presidential hopeful, campaigning heavily in Iowa, met with former minor league baseball players and local civic leaders in our Burlington, on the topic of trying to save 42 U.S. minor league baseball teams from the Major League Baseball chopping block. This number amounts to roughly a quarter of the total number of MLB-affiliated minor league clubs, collectively the MiLB. MLB’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, seemingly ran out of Major League-host cities to exploit for taxpayer-funded stadia, so now he’s attacking the smaller towns that have already taken on more of the burden of our protracted globalized economic collapse. Iowa has three teams (and cities) being threatened, each along the Mississippi River-- Burlington, Clinton, and Davenport (of the Quad Cities).

Bernie grew up an avid baseball fan in Brooklyn, New York, so he knows from an early age the devastation of a professional baseball team and community institution packing up and leaving, as the Dodgers did for California after the 1956 season. As the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, Bernie helped bring an MLB-affiliated minor league team to town. He said the team helped bring “a sense of community” to the city.

Manfred’s contentions on this matter are phony ones. He and his employers-- the 30 MLB club ownerships, are claiming that the ballparks in these specified smaller towns don’t measure up to what MLB “prospects” deserve. Supposedly, minor league club owners have gone cheap on clubhouse amenities, weight-training equipment and the like, and “riding the bus” in the minor leagues is no longer adequate treatment of a future big leaguer.

But here are the items Manfred is hiding from the debate in his attack upon the minor leagues:

1) MLB is in the middle of an Ivy League MBA-powered revolution in regards to the quantitative analysis of player development. The cartel of club owners has decided that they don’t need so many minor league affiliate clubs to house the ones that matter. Now that they’ve “solved” the durable problem of guessing which prospects will make it to the Show and which ones won’t, they don’t see the need to pay even the puniest of salaries to the extra players that fill out these rosters at the lower levels. The players that blossom late and against the “odds” are too few and far between to be worth the investment.

2) To this end, the Majors and the Minors are negotiating a new 10-year partnership this off-season, and MLB wants to push more of the cost of paying players onto the lower-level clubs. An ongoing class-action lawsuit by former minor league players alleges that owners are paying these players below minimum wage. When travel time is factored into their pay, according to the suit, the pay winds up below what’s allowable by law. Some players live on signing bonuses received sometimes a few years prior, and only if their perceived potential dictated a signing bonus to begin with. Others are living six or seven men to a house to save money and to keep their baseball dreams alive into their mid-20s. The minor league minimum salary is as low as $1,100 per month, especially in many of the lower-level leagues with cities on the cut list.

Where Bernie is trying to save Manfred and the owners from themselves is that Major League Baseball seems to be forgetting that their affiliates serve them in an additional capacity beyond their feeder players. The teams located in these towns help to grow the game for Major League ballpark attendance and to help booster the sport's notoriously-sagging national television ratings. In an era when a size-able number of children would rather sit and eat green beans than watch a baseball game, minor league teams are providing a vibrant, up-close, and inexpensive entry point into the sport. It’s shocking to consider that the owners of the MLB clubs aren’t already horrified by the headlines this negotiation is producing.

In our Midwest Burlington yesterday, at a round-table meeting, Bernie reminded the power class of MLB through the media that local governments across the U.S. already give teams “hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare.” Additionally, the United States Congress permits Major League Baseball to operate outside of antitrust laws, and no other major professional sports league in North America gets to do that. This inexplicable monopoly exemption, based on a premise already faulty in 1922 that Major League Baseball was not engaged in “interstate commerce,” has been shockingly long-lasting, but should never be considered a permanent condition. Congress could choose to revoke the exemption at any time, and then it would fall to the courts to determine whether or not a 21st century monopoly league that Forbes estimates to have cleared $10.3 billion in revenue in 2018 is still not interstate commerce.

The MLB plan amounts to a retraction of the sport of baseball. In addition to ditching 42 professionally-affiliated teams, the plan reduces the amateur player draft to 20 rounds of selections, and limits each organization to only 150 total players. Gone are the Rookie Leagues so the newly-drafted players would go to MLB team facilities instead, all of which are located in either Florida or Arizona-- where nobody watches baseball in the summer.

What’s particularly galling is the PR angle being taken by the league that says this is about the brick-and-mortar facilities and the treatment of the players. It's not. MLB wants fewer players and they want their responsibility to pay them to be trimmed. If the commissioner’s negotiation position is still flexible, as he says it is, it seems that’s where the additional tax burden for you and me will come into play. They’ll save a few clubs and cities, to be sure. Which communities will fork over the cash-- and which ones won’t? Those are your winners and your losers. In the meantime, the MLB position in negotiation is to drag all 42 of them through the mud-- claiming that their contributions to the partnership have been less than sufficient. Is attendance down in some of these markets? I imagine. Who’s to blame? Is it the lack of promotion at the local level, or is it Major League Baseball’s penchant for denigrating its own product and failing to grow national interest?

Last week, 106 congresspeople signed a letter to Manfred calling for MLB to reconsider its cuts. The text of the letter gently referenced the business' antitrust exemption. For Major League Baseball, this is the first fight before a larger one. They’re challenging minor league club owners now to save on their own costs (while league revenue has never been higher), and after 2021, the collective bargaining agreement with players-- Major League players-- expires as well. Hopefully we’ll still have a fully-loaded minor league system by then, one with 160 teams and featuring fair pay for work provided. While we're hoping, I'll order a President Sanders also.

posted by CM @ 7:13 PM