Rob Manfred did not make his name in baseball as a former player, as a general manager or team president or team owner, or as a marketing or broadcasting executive.
Manfred, the commissioner, made his name as a labor lawyer. On his watch a quarter-century of labor peace collapsed last December, when owners locked out players. And, in a dramatic move late Sunday night, the Major League Baseball Players Assn. declared its intention to represent minor league players.
If enough minor league players agree, Manfred and the major league owners would no longer decide for themselves how much minor leaguers should be paid. Collective bargaining would also determine if minor leaguers should continue to be bound to the major league team that signed them for as long as seven years, and what standards should be set in areas from housing and nutrition to licensing and merchandising.
“Poverty wages, oppressive reserve rules, discipline without due process, ever-expanding offseason obligations, appropriation of intellectual property, substandard attention to player health and safety, and a chronic lack of respect for minor leaguers as a whole (to name just a few) — these cancers on our game exist because Minor League Players have never had a seat at the bargaining table,” MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said in an email to agents, first obtained by the Athletic. “It’s time for that to change.”
That could have changed without the intervention of the players union, but the reforms Manfred and the owners have made within the minor leagues largely have been reactive rather than proactive.
When a group of minor leaguers sued MLB for violating the federal minimum wage law in 2014, MLB responded by lobbying Congress for an exemption to the law. Without an exemption, MLB warned, minor league teams could be eliminated.
In 2018, Congress approved the exemption. MLB eliminated 43 minor league teams anyway.
This year, as the Senate Judiciary Committee explored whether to strip MLB of its antitrust exemption, Manfred suggested that action could result in the elimination of even more minor league teams.
In the meantime, in 2020, a nonprofit organization called Advocates for Minor Leaguers had formed, using social media to show the cramped quarters and stingy…