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One of the planks of Major League Baseball’s plan slash threat to disaffiliate 42 Minor League Baseball clubs involved facilities. MLB believed too many facilities at too many parks were out-of-date, unsafe, unproductive, and unhelpful. There’s some truth to that, too: some stadiums do have old facilities that could use upgrading, and it would have been good of the MiLB owners, who don’t have to pay the players in their employ, the same players who help them make a profit, to work on upgrading those facilities with those revenues.
At the same time, MLB teams can certainly afford to do it themselves: sure, MLB signs some minor-league players to significant bonuses, and they do pay the player salaries, but those salaries are poverty-level wages — scratch that, poverty-level wages would be an improvement on what most of the players are taking home. The “surplus” value, the profits generated by these players, are more than enough for MLB to be able to reinvest back into not just the players, but the places they are playing.
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