Playing for peanuts

In the movie Field of Dreams, the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson wistfully recalls his days with the Chicago White Sox before his fall from grace following a 1919 gambling scandal.

“I’d have played for food money,” Jackson, played by Ray Liotta, tells Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella, the Iowa farmer who plowed under his cornfield to build a baseball field in hopes Jackson would play there. After further waxing romantic about his life in baseball, Jackson says, “Shoot, I’d have played for nothing.”

Minor leaguers across the country don’t share that sentiment.

A year ago, in response to minor leaguers’ demands for better pay, Major League Baseball considered axing 42 minor league clubs. MLB essentially got its way last December, eliminating 40 teams in a massive restructuring of its minor league system. Each club now has just five minor league affiliates—one at each level (Triple-A, Double-A, High-A, Low-A, and Rookie)—whereas before, some teams had as many as eight.

The purge left roughly 1,000 players jobless. The remaining prospects say their paychecks haven’t gotten fatter: According to Harry Marino, executive director of Advocates for Minor Leaguers (AML) and a former minor leaguer himself, most players earn less than $15,000 per year playing baseball.

The players’ parent clubs haven’t done much to ameliorate their spartan living and working conditions either: At least three teams—the Los Angeles Angels, Oakland A’s, and Baltimore Orioles—have come under fire for their treatment of their minor leaguers this season.

Kieran Lovegrove, a pitcher for the Angels’ Double-A affiliate in Huntsville, Ala., described how he and six teammates crowded into a three-bedroom apartment. Shane Kelso, who pitched for the Angels’ Low-A team in San Bernardino, Calif., before retiring, said some teammates slept in camper vans at trailer parks while others slept in their cars.

AML raised similar complaints on behalf of Orioles minor leaguers back in June: Facing a two-week homestand (a series of games at a team’s home field), the organization tweeted that players for Baltimore’s ­Double-A affiliate in nearby Bowie, Md., considered sleeping in their cars because they couldn’t afford to stay in the team hotel. At $900, the cost of the two-week stay would have consumed 80 percent of the players’ paychecks.

Orioles general manager Mike Elias denied that the Bowie players’ situation was so dire, vigorously defending his team’s efforts to ensure that players in its farm system are taken care of. AML later reported that the Bowie Baysox had arranged for its players to stay at the team hotel for a significantly reduced rate.

The Angels and the A’s have also faced criticism for failing to supply their minor leaguers with quality food. AML posted on Twitter a picture of an A’s player’s post-game meal: a cheese sandwich on shriveled white bread with a scoop of coleslaw on the side.

Eating well is “required for our job,” Kelso told Sports Illustrated. “If we don’t do that, our bodies fail and we can’t do it.”

Angels and A’s executives have pledged to do better by their minor leaguers. However, Elias said in June that MLB clubs are “continuing to evolve, continuing to fine-tune the way that the industry invests in player development.”

Translation: MLB teams will pinch pennies for as long as they can, and only minor leaguers themselves can decide whether it’s worth it to suffer in pursuit of their major league dreams.

In the meantime, cities that lost their minor league teams are not experiencing a baseball void: Some of the teams moved to leagues MLB has either formed or deemed partners. Others now have collegiate summer-league teams. The Salem-Keizer Volcanoes in Oregon, a former MLB affiliate, has even formed its own independent four-team league.

—WORLD has updated this story to correct the definition of a homestand.