Senate Judiciary Committee is asking questions about MLB’s antitrust exemption

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

I can’t sit here and tell you that the Senate Judiciacy Committee questioning the legality of MLB’s century-spanning antitrust exemption is going to go anywhere productive. What I do know, though, is that the lone road to removing the antitrust exemption goes through Congress, and not the Supreme Court, so this is news worth taking note of all the same.

Continue reading “Senate Judiciary Committee is asking questions about MLB’s antitrust exemption”

Minor leaguers for A’s, four others haven’t been paid for months, can’t afford to eat

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

How are minor-league players that aren’t being paid to do their job supposed to be able to afford food, exactly? The A’s, Brewers, Angels, Marlins, and Reds have decided it’s simply not their problem to solve, according to Advocates for Minor Leaguers and this report from The Athletic’s Evan Drellich. Those five clubs are the ones still refusing to pay their minor leaguers in extended spring training, and the result of that is it costing these players money to work.

Continue reading “Minor leaguers for A’s, four others haven’t been paid for months, can’t afford to eat”

Taijuan Walker, Mark Canha, and vocal support of Pride

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Obviously, Major League Baseball’s clubhouses have a long way to go in terms of even catching up to the rest of the country, on a cultural level. Take the Pride Nights that occur in June across most of the league, for instance. They’re a fairly anodyne event, generally speaking — Pride is fairly corporate at this point, which is the kind of thing that only happens when you pass a certain level of general acceptance (i.e., there is money to be made from associating with it) — and while there are certainly forces in the United States attempting to roll back everything to a time when trans people didn’t feel comfortable identifying as such publicly, which is surely just the first stanza in a new poem that riffs on “First they came for…”, support for LGBTQIA+ people is light years ahead of where it used to be. Which, you know, is part of the reason there are certain forces in the United States attempting to roll back everything in the first place.

Continue reading “Taijuan Walker, Mark Canha, and vocal support of Pride”

Some MLB owners are mad at the A’s. And?

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

​It was pretty clear that what the A’s did with their offseason was egregious even as it was happening. In reaction to winning 86 games in 2021, having the postseason expand from 10 to 12 clubs, and being authorized to receive revenue-sharing payments once again under the new collective bargaining agreement, Oakland started trading away its desirable players making more than the minimum salary. Oh, and they also kept raising their ticket prices, too. Maybe they thought all that salt in the wound would cauterize it.

It’s all bad enough that now you’ve got a few anonymous MLB owners leaking to Jon Heyman that the A’s behavior bothers them:

Continue reading “Some MLB owners are mad at the A’s. And?”

One orioles Owner is suing other Orioles owners

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

It’s good to keep an eye on potential movements in MLB’s ownership class, since these are the people with the power to make things more tolerable, or, more likely, even worse for the members of the Players Association, or the minor-league players still in a state of nascent, non-union-for-now organizing. With that in mind, let’s check out what’s going on in Baltimore, where one Angelos brother is suing the other Angelos brother, and also their mother:

Continue reading “One orioles Owner is suing other Orioles owners”

Red Sox show how easy it is to properly house minor leaguers

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Part of what makes MLB’s owners refusing to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to providing housing for their minor-league players is how simple it would be to do the right thing. And inexpensive, too, as the reporting of the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier shows. The Red Sox are one of the teams actually putting together the kind of housing plan that players should have, and it has cost them all of “close to $1 million” to do it. Continue reading “Red Sox show how easy it is to properly house minor leaguers”

An expanded postseason means reduced effort

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Obviously, it’s a little too early to say for sure that increasing the number of teams that can make the MLB postseason will never increase the in-season level of competition for those spots. But, as I wrote at Baseball Prospectus on Wednesday, the early returns aren’t looking even a little bit promising.

In the new collective bargaining agreement reached between the league and the Players Association in March, the postseason expanded from 10 teams to 12. This was expected, as MLB’s desire for a larger postseason was one of the major points of leverage the union had coming into negotiations, and it was considered a win that the PA was able to avoid giving the league what they actually were looking for, which was a 14-team arrangement. And thank Baseba’al for that, because if you think the laissez-faire attitude of the league towards building competitive teams is bad now, just imagine how much worse it could be.

Continue reading “An expanded postseason means reduced effort”

Advocates for Minor Leaguers released progress reports for MLB’s treatment of MiLB players

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Major League Baseball has continued giving in to the demands of Advocates for Minor Leaguers and the players they’re, well, advocating for, and it is a lovely thing to see in action. Advocacy works, it turns out, as MLB fears two things: the public being aware of the way they treat minor-league players with any more detail than they already have, and those same minor-league players finally getting together to organize into a union or unions that will get their rights in writing. So yeah, Advocates and the players are in a position to keep making noise about how things aren’t ideal yet. And the results have been excellent.

Consider this: at the end of January, Advocates for Minor Leaguers demanded, with the backing of players they spoke to on the matter, changes to MLB’s new housing policy, which was created without any input from the people it was for and would be affecting. They identified loopholes that existed to cut costs for teams and would be negatives for the players — such as throwing multiple players into bedrooms together like they were in college dorms — and stated that they would be publicly identifying the teams throughout the season that failed to make the changes the players demanded to the system.

Continue reading “Advocates for Minor Leaguers released progress reports for MLB’s treatment of MiLB players”

Just drop the appeal, Josh Donaldson

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

The Yankees’ Josh Donaldson was suspended by MLB for exactly one (1) game for twice calling the White Sox’ Tim Anderson “Jackie” during last Saturday’s game between the two clubs. He is appealing the suspension, which is not exactly a great way to show that the supposed contrition in his statement is genuine:

Continue reading “Just drop the appeal, Josh Donaldson”

Reminders of the power imbalance between MLB’s teams, prospects

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Kumar Rocker has finally signed. No, not with a Major League Baseball team, but with the independent Tri-City Valley Cats. The former Vanderbilt ace had to go this route because, last summer, the Mets drafted him and then essentially refused to sign him, as they attempted to lowball him due to injury concerns and refused to actually negotiate with their first-round pick.

The Mets were able to do this knowing that they would have a second first-round pick waiting for them in the 2022 draft as compensation for not signing Kumar. So long as their offer is worth at least 40 percent of the slot value for where the player was selected, the club remains eligible for this compensation. While the initial report said that the Mets didn’t make a formal offer to Rocker at all, they’re listed as having the 11th-overall pick in the 2022 amateur entry draft, and it being marked as compensation — clearly, they did make an offer, even if it was as equivalently serious to not making one at all.

Continue reading “Reminders of the power imbalance between MLB’s teams, prospects”