February 2020 - Marc Normandin is creating baseball coverage, featuring leftism

We’re already seeing sporting events impacted by the coronavirus

The History of Baseball Unionization: The Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players

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Major League Baseball players had few rights before the signing of the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports in 1968. They didn’t get all of their current rights all at once, either: the battle was, and is, an ongoing one. Before the Players Association, before Marvin Miller, there were other attempts to organize baseball players against the bosses. In this series, we’ll investigate each of those attempts, and suss out what went wrong.

There was an attempt to organize professional baseball players years before there was ever a Major League Baseball. Back in 1885, the National League reigned supreme. The league was in its 10th season, and had thrived in ways previous major leagues had not — and had done so in part due to the reserve clause. The reserve clause, established in 1879, gave NL clubs unlimited control over its players, severely weakening their ability to negotiate for more money, while making it impossible to play for another team at all. This is the same reserve clause that was banished from MLB nearly 100 years later, thanks to the efforts of Curt Flood, Marvin Miller, Andy Messersmith, Dave McNally, and the rest of the Players Association that fought for the right for free agency, the clause that made a player the property of their team in perpetuity.

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Blue Jays black out all of Canada, and it’s a symptom of a larger issue

Giants raise MiLB player wages, subsidize housing (for some)

Anthony Rizzo calls out the Cubs, MLB, and he’s not wrong

Here’s why MiLB players won’t be paid for appearing in MLB The Show

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If you’re a fan of baseball video games, and have been waiting for minor-league players to finally be included in one, you’re in luck! The latest edition of MLB The Show is going to include full minor-league rosters for the first time ever. Oh, here’s just a tiny side note: those minor-league players aren’t going to be paid for the use of their likeness in the game, because MLB owns those and can do whatever they want with it.

Minor League Baseball’s players sign a uniform contract. MLB players also have uniform contracts, but the language contained within those has been negotiated over the course of decades through collective bargaining, and that uniform language is a base upon which they can build specifics. Not so with the minors, where the contract is the contract, and cannot be altered by the players: sign it or don’t sign it, but only one of those outcomes allows you to play pro ball under the MLB umbrella.

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Mets’ renovated spring training clubhouse a reminder of gap between MLB and MiLB

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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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Month: February 2020