They uhhhh are doing the damn thing! In this emergency podcast, Alex and Bobby break down the announcement that the MLBPA has launched a campaign to unionize minor league baseball players, diving into the history that brought us here, why the current moment is ripe for this effort, and what the coming fight might look like.
Links:
The MLBPA’s statement on their campaign to unionize the minors
Joon Lee on the MLBPA sending out union authorization cards
Evan Drellich on the effort the unionize the minors
Where is the minor league unionization effort? (from 2012)
Buy Unionize the Minors merchandise
Songs featured in this episode:
The Clash — “Career Opportunities” • Booker T & the M.G.’s — “Green Onions”
Episode Transcript
[INTRO MUSIC]
Tell us a little bit about what you saw and, and, and being able to relay that message to Cora when you watch Kimbrel pitching and kind of help out so he wasn’t Tipping his Pitches. So Tipping Pitches, we hear about it all the time. People are home on the stand, what Tipping Pitches it’s all about? That’s amazing! That’s remarkable.
BOBBY: Alex, in the history of the Tipping Pitches Podcast, there’s only ever been two emergency pods. And I believe today makes the third, although I don’t know how much of it you can really characterize as an emergency pod. Since this is just the day that we normally release the pod still. There was an emergency situation that we had to handle, which was that we had an entire episode scheduled, ready to release, fully edited, wonderful episode. And that episode is going to be heard by you lovely listeners on Thursday because you know why, Alex?
ALEX: Tell me.
BOBBY: The unionizing the damn minor leagues.
ALEX: What?! What?!
BOBBY: MLBPA Communications, the Major League Baseball Players Association has launched a campaign to unionize minor league players across the country. Do you think this day would come? Certainly not this soon.
ALEX: I mean, eventually, not this weekend.
BOBBY: Yeah. Yep. Not this weekend. If I had known this day was gonna come this weekend, we probably wouldn’t have done all that stuff that I said about putting together an entire podcast.
ALEX: I’m like, I’m not even in New York right now, right? I’m, I’m out in California for the next week and a half. I was like, what the fuck? You know, what can happen? I’ll bring my recording stuff just in case. But you know–
BOBBY: Thankfully, you brought your recording stuff. I’m gonna start by reading a part of the statement from the Major League Baseball Players Association and Executive Director, Tony Clark, because candidly, I don’t really know where else to start. So check out me vamping while by, by reading a Twitter statement.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Major League Baseball Players Association has launched a campaign to unionize the minor leagues across the country. That historic effort ticked off Sunday night after receiving overwhelming support from the MLBPAs executive board. Minor leaguers represent our games future and deserve wages and working conditions that befit elite athletes who entertain millions of baseball fans nationwide. MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark said, they’re an important part of our fraternity and we want to help them achieve their goals both on and off the field. This campaign is supported by Advocates for Minor Leaguers. It goes on to say that those employees who were working for advocates for minor leaguers are now resigning and taking roles within the Major League Baseball Players Association. So Advocates for Minor Leaguers which we have discussed. At length on this podcast will be folded into the Major League Baseball Players Association. Now Alex, we are going to talk about what comes next? We are going to talk about the relevant parties in the labor fight to come. We’re going to talk about what got us here, as we have been talking about on this podcast for the last two and a half years? But before we do all of that I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: I am Alex Bazeley.
BOBBY: And you’re listening to the Tipping Pitches, they’re unionizing in the minor leagues emergency podcast.
[3:14]
[Music Theme]
BOBBY: Man, does this feel bigger than the CBA, wildly so?
ALEX: Absolutely!
BOBBY: Like, not six–
ALEX: Six weeks, yeah.
BOBBY: –months ago, we were on a Zoom together, talking about how, this is the biggest pod we’ve ever done.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And now we’re doing it again, man.
ALEX: Right. I mean, the thing about that is, we always knew it was coming, right? We maybe didn’t know that there was going to be a lockout, per se, but we had an idea that there was going to be some sort of labor, labor struggle. We knew what was at stake. So it’s–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –not like anything that happened necessarily caught us completely by surprise, right?
BOBBY: Surprise, surprise. The owners don’t want to give the players what they want.
ALEX: Yeah. This is, this feels completely different, right? This is unprecedented. CBAs, CBA negotiations take place every five years, and a lot of them are relatively similar.
BOBBY: Famously, we know the day that the CBA expires.
ALEX: Yeah, exactly. This has never been done before.
BOBBY: Not in baseball, at least. It has been done in other sports, which we’ll talk about.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: And we’re going to talk about, like I said, we’re going to talk about the what’s coming next. What are the next steps? What is the NLRB? We’re going to talk about union elections. I’m going to share my own personal experience. You’re gonna give a brief history of the fight for minor league unionization. But before we do I want to hear what did it feel like to see Joon Lee tweet this news three times and delete it twice and then perfect his, perfect his tweet.
ALEX: Obviously, some people I think were very nervous about the fact that the tweet was deleted, right? Because he tweets out the news. The MLBPA is going to be sending out union cards to minor leaguers in an effort to unionize Minor League Baseball. And then that tweet gets deleted and it gets tweeted again with like, I think an extra period and then deleted again and we [5:14] what is–
BOBBY: [5:14] we’re proud of that, though.
ALEX: Yeah, exactly. And people are like, what does this mean? Like what is happening? And at that point, it was like, it’s not like this was an accident.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: Or you just got fed a wrong piece of news. Like that was, that was him working through his own thing and figuring out how he wanted to drop it.
BOBBY: It wasn’t like–
ALEX: Incredibly relatable.
BOBBY: –got hacked and was tweeting Bitcoin shit, the day that the CBA was agreed to. Joon was still in control of his own Twitter–
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: –account. But I do think that that contributed to the surreal feeling of it was that Joon tweeting–
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: –and deleting tweeting and deleting. People were quote, tweeting things, people were sending me quote, tweets, where Joon’s original tweet had been deleted. So I didn’t know what–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –they were talking about. The Slack–
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: –was exploding. Our mention were exploding.
ALEX: [6:02] never seen it more active.
BOBBY: People were just tweeting stuff like OMG @tipping_pitches, you know, like stuff like that. Which, if you’re one of those people, thank you so much for thinking of us in this moment. Thank you for reaching out via digital carrier pigeon to share this experience together. But, but please know that this barrage of tweets, it did cause my head to spend quite a bit. And I imagine yours as well. I texted you feeling that, I texted you saying that I was feeling concussed.
ALEX: Yes. Yeah, I, I said this, like, it felt like I was just off my meds. Like I, like the my world was blurry around the edges. Again, this is compounded by the fact that not like 20 minutes after this news drops, that the music channel starts blowing up that one, one Blondie, one Taylor Swift is dropping a new album. And I was like–
BOBBY: You can’t make it up.
ALEX: –actually, I physically don’t have the capacity to process everything that’s going on. I was like, like, you and I were texting. And we were like, how, how to do this?
BOBBY: My body is shutting down. Yeah.
ALEX: Yeah, I was like, I needed to go to bed. I was running on like three hours of sleep anyway. So I was in a state.
BOBBY: I think that we should start this conversation by saying, this is the most important news that has happened, from the way that we view the sport, since we’ve started doing this podcast. Obviously, the, the fight to improve the CBA from the one that they signed in 2015. What- has been discussed the entire time of that cont- had been discussing the entire time of that contract. Obviously, the lead up to the lockout, we covered it, like it was basically the play like most other baseball podcasts would cover the playoffs or the World Series. But the combination of not knowing when this would happen and not knowing if it was going to happen in this form, I think makes this news feel like so much more of a bombshell than anything that we’ve ever covered before. And, you know, immediately people like Eugene Friedman, people like us were saying this doesn’t guarantee that they will have a union this doesn’t, this doesn’t ensure a victory. This doesn’t guarantee anything in any future CBA that they will negotiate. But the fact that the fight is officially on, the fact that it’s no longer, we should unionize the minor leagues. The fact that it’s no longer the, it’s no longer people like us saying the best way to fix the conditions of the minor leagues is through unionization, is through collective bargaining, is through uniting the workers that are most hard done in, in baseball, underneath Major League Baseball’s umbrella. The fact that it’s not just us theorizing about that is honestly like really hard to process. Like not even in a funny this stuff is all happening online and on Twitter. And everybody’s getting jokes off. And everybody’s say we’re, saying we’re smoking that owners pack. I love everyone’s jokes very, very much. And I was laughing very hard at them. But at the same time, I’m like, I struggle to think of a more seismic thing that could have just been news dumped on a Sunday night, honestly.
ALEX: Yes. 100%. And as you mentioned, this is just the start of this campaign. There’s the MLBPA now begins the long road of letting players know the benefits of a union. And getting them to actually sign these cards that would authorize the the official union vote and we’ll and we’ll get into like the mechanics of this. I know that today, they’re also answering questions from major leaguers.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Because it seems like many of them were caught off guard or, or somewhat surprised that this news just dropped out of nowhere. Although I have to assume that many of them were aware that these efforts were, were going on. This was not happening outside of the purview of the, you know, Executive Committee of the MLBPA or whatever.
BOBBY: Yep. The, I thought that Evan Drellich article in The Athletic was the most illuminating in terms of what this looked like from the MLB. Players Association side. Evan reported that they had a meeting on Friday. Of course they’ve been, of course they must have been having regular meetings about this for the last, however many months or years or I don’t know when this began, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about this from people like Evan. But Evan reported that Friday night, the MLB Executive Committee, which is made up of players who get elected to that committee, and the team representatives who get elected to represent the individual teams, the 30, Major League Baseball teams. They authorized this action, they authorized offering membership in the MLB Players Association to the 5000 plus minor leaguers. And then over the next couple days, over the weekend, they took the steps to send out those cards to the minor leaguers. And that’s about as much as we know, in terms of the actual process from the union side. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this. And I’m sure that, you know, those meetings today, pull back some of the curtain a little bit for the Major League Baseball players, and then those players will go on and talk to sources. And we’ll, we’ll get more of a an image of what this look like from that side. But I will say, you know, I saw a lot of people being like, I’m surprised that this was the that is, it was the Players Association who was doing this. Because it seems like they haven’t had interest in doing this in the past. It’s weird that the member rank and file membership of the union, the meaning like 99% of the players, were probably unaware of this. I would guess that the, the ones who are most involved in the union had an idea of this and the ones who are not, it’s just it’s would be impractical to involve, involve all of the 1200 of the people who are technically union members at any one time, the 40 players on each team for the 30 teams. Because those people are very busy, because it’s a lot of people to wrangle. But it’s not uncommon for like a union’s executive leadership to make a decision on trying to organize a new company, or in this case, a new sector of workers under the same industrial umbrella that you’re already in. So we’ll talk more about the, the next steps in the process. But nothing that I’ve seen so far has been like, super out of the ordinary, in my perspective.
ALEX: Right. Yeah. And, and I think it’s worth noting that the Players Association does not go forward with this effort. Unless they think that they have both the support of their current membership to take this action. And also the support of a good amount of minor leaguers, right? You’re not going to bring this forth, unless you’ve been doing the work on the ground and actually think you have a chance of winning, right? This is the, the authorization cards that have been sent out, are, are simply a vote on whether or not to–
BOBBY: Have a vote.
ALEX: –take a vote to form a union, right? So that, so that bar is 30%, you have to assume that they were confident they would blow through that benchmark, right? Because if you–
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: –only have 30% of the players who come back then even that doesn’t bode well for the actual vote itself to form a union, which requires 50% plus one esse- essentially, right?
BOBBY: Yes. So the 30% number that’s going around. Basically, in order for the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, to take your petition to form a union seriously. Like to accept the petition and to enact the law that requires you to have a vote on whether or not you have a union, you have to show 30% support via these union cards that were sent out on Sunday. You have to have 30% of the prospective members of that union sign those union cards, and then it can go forward to a vote of the entire constituency. So they don’t have to send these cards to everyone. And they could could technically only send it to the 30% of people that they know will sign them. But they will send them to everybody. Because say that 80% of people sign them, or 70% of people sign them that shows to Major League Baseball, hey, we have a majority already, easily. And you know, in like the case of the Ringer Union, we had over 95% of people sign those union cards. And now at this point, once they receive that, that 30%, once they cross that threshold and prove to the National Labor Relations Board that they are able to cross that, cross that threshold, because that’s what the, the law says that they have to do. It’ll be up to MLB to decide whether or not they want to voluntarily recognize their union or request that the NLRB hold a union election. More likely they will do the second one.
ALEX: Right. Wait, you don’t, you don’t think Major League Baseball is gonna voluntarily recognize a minor league union?
BOBBY: If we know anything about Major League Baseball, it’s that they are not amenable to things that players want. But you know, I, I guess if 95% of minor leaguers sign them, it would be just impractical for Rob and the owners to, to force an election, but I know that they would just to delay it. But–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –in theory, it’s possible that the, I’ll say the the, the NBA, the National Basketball Association did voluntarily recognize the G League union. They had 75% in their initial union card signup. So that is where we’re at right now. I think there’s almost no chance that MLB voluntarily recognizes the union because of what you’re saying. Because in the time period that it takes once you’ve crossed that 30% threshold, and triggered an NLRB mandatory union election, that is when MLB is going to wage their propaganda campaign. And it’s common.
ALEX: Yep.
BOBBY: And it’s going to be scorched earth.
ALEX: Yes, it’s gonna be fierce.
BOBBY: But before we even talk about that, because that’s a little bit of theorizing about what the future is going to look like. I, we should probably talk about how we even got here. And people have been listening for a really long time. Of course, know that we’ve been chronicling the ascension of the minor league labor baseball story, basically, since the pandemic and that was like a, a, an inciting incident. And how MLB treated those minor leaguers. But I know that you put together an even further reaching timeline than that, right?
ALEX: Right. And, and this is by no means comprehensive. And, you know, I, I want you to fill in any gaps that I’ve missed. But I think it’s interesting to kind of look back beyond the last year of organizing this happened. Beyond the, the pandemic, which I think really shifted a lot of people’s, a lot of the public’s perception on minor league treatment. I think it’s interesting to kind of push back beyond that and look at some of the key moments that really made this sort of organization effort possible, right? I mean, first of all, I think it’s worth noting that this was a fight that Marvin Miller, the architect of the MLBPA was not a stranger to, right? He recognized that Minor League Baseball players had very specific conditions that probably necessitated a union. And he also recognized the immense task that, that would be to organize given the the difficulties they already were having, trying to whip the MLBPA constituency into line, basically, right? Back in 2012, a [17:48] 94-year old. Marvin Miller said in an interview to slate that he had revisited this idea many times throughout his career. And recognize the necessity of it but determined it wasn’t viable because of the, the disparate geographic nature of the minor leagues. And the lack of resources for that sort of thing. He said, quote, “The notion that these very young, inexperienced people were going to defy the owners, when they had started on the rise about making it to the major leagues, it’s just not going to happen”. And–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –that feels like kind of the perfect distillation of why we haven’t gotten a union to this point, right? Because they’re an incredibly vulnerable labor force, in that they have little to no leverage over MLB owners. As mentioned, they exist across the country. And there’s turnover in the ranks every few years. But most importantly, I think a lot of minor leaguers haven’t been thinking about this, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Because you don’t really have the capacity to do that when you’re trying to live out your dream, right? And make it to the major leagues. And that really feels like it kind of characterized this conversation for the better part of the last like, half century.
BOBBY: Yes. And another really important element of that which we’ve talked about in the past is the uniform player contract which, you know, we, we got into I think a little bit more on the conversation that we had about the, the Senate Judiciary Committee antitrust letter, which mentioned the uniform player contract. And that uniform player contract basically dictates the terms of the employment of every single minor leaguer. And they have to sign it, it’s not optional, can’t redline it, can’t change it. You have to sign away a certain amount of your rights. And, and one of those things is that you can be cut for any reason. Now we see this all over the United States labor force is, is at will employment. Being one of the biggest barriers to any sort of workplace solidarity or workplace. solidification of good jobs in the workplace. Is that if you can be fired or let go for any reason, at any point, just because the company doesn’t want to have you around anymore. Well, what does that sound like? That sounds like a baseball roster. You start getting a little brazen, talking about let’s minor league players of the world unite. And all of a sudden they cut you because your strikeout rate was over 15%. You know, like, I have talked to people who have experienced in the minor leagues. I have talked to people who are sympathetic to the idea of needing a union in minor league baseball, none of those people were ever comfortable about saying that to their teammates in any kind of way that could lead back to the organization. Now, you know, there, there are a handful of, of players who have been outspoken, much more in the last couple of years. But dating back to that Marvin Miller quote that you’re talking about, that has been the dominant received wisdom of talking about organizing Minor League Baseball.
ALEX: Yeah, exactly. And Miller’s words would ring true for years following, right? I mean, so in 2009, one player named Garrett Brooches, you may have heard of him.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Decided to leave professional baseball and, and get a law degree, right? And a few short years later–BOBBY: The domino meme.
ALEX: Yes, exactly, exactly, right? Garrett Brooches leave–
BOBBY: Hits the law degree.
ALEX: –professional baseball.
BOBBY: Monkey’s paw curls.
ALEX: Yeah, exactly. Right. So So then fast forward to 2014. And the law firm he works for is decides to take up the case of Semi versus Major League Baseball, right? Which claims that players have been, that minor league players have been underpaid for years, when you consider the just the amount of time that they actually put into being a, a minor league player. This is obviously that the same case that would, that would garner class action status in 2019.
BOBBY: And get settled earlier this year.
ALEX: And get settled earlier this year. Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s a really kind of important piece of this whole history. Because it, at least in my book kind of felt like the, the glue that was holding a lot of these conversations together, right? As this was making its way through the courts over the last eight years, there was something you could point to and say there is a legal battle being waged, that Minor League Baseball players are exploited, right? It felt a bit like the, like the North Star of efforts on behalf of labor conditions in the minor leagues.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And so obviously, while this case was, was settled earlier this year, I think it’s, you know, important to not forget just how important that was at, like, whipping up public interest in this sort of thing, right? And getting, and getting 1000s of minor league players on board with the fact that they are not actually alone in this sort of thing.
BOBBY: Yes. And, you know, it’s interesting that that became, like you’re talking about such a North Star for this effort. Because there’s nothing in that court case, there’s nothing in that class action lawsuit that directly says you need to unionize.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: But what we do in this country is we, we default to not having unions, until things get so bad that you need it. And a $185 million class action lawsuit where MLB is essentially admitting guilt, even though legally they’re not really admitting guilt. But they’re giving $185, so that $185 million, so that they don’t have to admit that they stole wages from these players. And if they’re stealing wages from you, how else are you going to prevent them from doing that in the future? If not unionizing, those two things are inherently linked. And without the existence of the first one. I do feel like, it would have been hard to get a lot of players on board with the idea that they’re being hard done by. To unlearn some of these received wisdoms about how you have to go through these specific steps in this specific way to become a Major League Baseball player and get your pay day eventually down the road.
ALEX: Yeah, well, and a lot of these kinds of events that have taken place over the last few years, again, didn’t explicitly make the case for a union necessarily. But I think we’re really important in bringing the public’s attention to, frankly, the greed that a lot of owners have around both minor league players and major league players, right? I think that’s in 2015, there’s another really big moment that I think matters not necessarily in the union fight specifically, but in the public’s perception towards labor dynamics in baseball, right? And that’s Kris Bryant, being held down in the minor leagues for two weeks. In order for the Cubs to delay his free agency by year, which had that workout for them, by the way, worth it?
BOBBY: The day that we stop armchair analyzing the Kris Bryant service time manipulation will be the day that this podcast no longer posts.
ALEX: Absolutely. But like that was a really–
BOBBY: Seminal moment.
ALEX: –seminal moment, because it was a really easy way for fans to understand and get insight into how owners approach these negotiations, right? And it felt like this sort of, I don’t want to say watershed moment, but it would be very representative over how Major League Baseball teams would operate over the coming years, right? As we kind of have this sort of Moneyball 2.0 experience going on where, where teams realize that they can get the most value out of players by making sure they’re young and underpaid and good.
BOBBY: Yes. And what the Kris Bryant service time manipulation did, what Moneyball 2.0 did, what Sandy versus MLB did is they concretized these things that MLB owners thought and acted on for the public.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: They made it obvious. And the people covering them are part of this too. But without getting too far ahead of myself, that the fact that at the same time that the MLB Players Association is trying to get more combative with the owners, there’s a very obvious elephant in the room, which is that no matter how hard done these young players are, these pre-arb players are, they’re making 100 times more than the minor leaguers, who are a lot of times 24 hours away from being those–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –Major League Baseball players. In the case of Kris Bryant, they’re literally 12 hours away from being part of the same labor pool. And they’re being treated so differently. They’re not–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –getting the same protections and those, those truths that people have known for decades that players have known since the beginning of time that you’re being mistreated in the minor leagues, that you’re not actually getting your value back. People started having a vocabulary for that, because the Major League Baseball Players Association was talking about it at the same time.
ALEX: Yeah, and I think that’s really important to remember in these moments like, we obviously cannot necessarily speak to the internal fights and conversations that were happening about unionization over the last decade. Which I’m sure were happening, and we weren’t privy to, right? But again, there was so much kind of fear around speaking out around this sort of thing that we really kind of know, relatively little about a lot of these internal negotiations. But a huge part of getting to this moment is owners getting a little greedy, frankly, and getting a little more blatant about the ways in which they were trying to steal wages from minor leaguers. Steal wages from major leaguers, right? In 2018, you have Major League Baseball, publicly lobbying for the Save America’s Pastime Act to be included in President Trump’s trillion dollar budget. Which would exempt minor league players from minimum wage laws and overtime laws. That, to me is where it really feels like the narrative starts to shift a little bit. Because you have Major League Baseball, openly admitting they’re not interested in paying minor league players, right? And however they want to make their case that they’re seasonal employees, that their apprentices, whatever it is, I think it doesn’t really matter. Because it boils down to the owner saying, no, we actually think you getting paid $7,000 a year is okay. And here is why.
BOBBY: Yep. I mean, we can, we can sliding doors a million moments on this timeline, to me that one is the one that is most fruitful to sliding doors.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: Because from the day that the Save America’s Pastime Act was publicized as being close to be pet- being pass and then passed. Even our nascent days of talking about labor on this show, we were crushing that. And like, it’s not like we had the most reformed opinions on, you know, labor theory of value, or the financial dynamics of Major League Baseball. Not even that we know everything that we should know now, but we definitely know way more than we did back then. And even back then it felt really, really egregious what they were doing. And that was one of those moments where it really solidified this notion of surplus value for the owners. And that if they can artificially suppress what they have to pay the players, well, then where is that money going? It’s going straight–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –back into their pockets. And that’s that greed that you’re talking about that really, I think, has come back to bite them on multiple occasions, as we’ve talked about, in some of these ones that you’re about to get to.
ALEX: Right, exactly. I mean, and that kind of brings us to 2020 and everything that happens over that first COVID season as it relates to Minor League Baseball players where things become even more apparent than they ever have been before, right? This is kind of where it reaches a fever pitch as it relates to the conversation around treatment of minor leaguers, right? You have organizations like More Than Baseball and Advocates for Minor Leaguers that are really kind of coalescing and coming into their own in bringing forth the conditions under which minor leaguers are playing, right? There’s the infamous photo of the, the sandwiches, which is a very generous way of putting it. That minor leaguers in the A’s system were, were receiving. Go ahead.
BOBBY: Before that, though- I think before that I actually don’t really know what, what came along. But bigger than that, I will say is that March 10, 2020. We found out that the owners didn’t want to pay any minor leaguers.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I think that was honestly, the moment where I was like, where I felt that at some point, this was going to result in a unionization push. I don’t see how any other way like for, for something like this, for something this massive to happen globally. And for owners to immediately say we’re not going to pay you a couple $1,000 that we were paying you before. It just felt like how can that not push these workers together? How can that not give these, give minor leaguers something to unite over? Because the blowback was so fierce. And the owners relented, some of them at least. A lot of them–
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: –at least relented because I think they were surprised at how mad everyone was. You know it’s early because of COVID.
ALEX: Yeah. [31:24] I think didn’t, I think they really didn’t realize how much people were actually paying attention or how much they will [31:31]–
BOBBY: Because it goes to show you what fucking bubble they were living in during COVID.
ALEX: Yes, exactly. I mean, I can–
BOBBY: Working in trillions with their other jobs.
ALEX: Right. At the exact same time. I mean, I guess, four months prior, they, they float a plan to contract the minor leagues, then in March of 2020–
BOBBY: So true.
ALEX: –they like and now. Again, like, this is where things start to get just so–
BOBBY: Scrooge McDuck.
ALEX: –complicated and naughty. Yeah, exactly. Because there are things happening across the board at every level, right? So they make their announcement to eliminate 42 minor league affiliates in March of 2020. At the same time, you have them talking about not wanting to pay minor leaguers. You have these individual anecdotes of the meals that they’re getting in the minor leagues. That the, the treatment that they’re just kind of receiving in this pandemic season. And it does kind of feel like there’s no turning back at this point. Like there’s really no way from Major League Baseball, to put the cat in the bag. And I think it’s especially important because it starts to dovetail with the way that broader working class Americans are being treated by corporations in the pandemic, right? This is where you’re paying attention to baseball, but you’re also seeing the way that frontline workers are being treated, right? You’re seeing the way that the devastation of an economy, so to speak, is being put upon the most vulnerable people so that the billionaire class doesn’t have to worry about their profits, right?
BOBBY: I think that that is when it starts to dovetail with the MLB Players Association.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Most closely is that when those two groups, those two, those two constituents of workers, their interests start to align the most. Because what, what’s happening with the minor leaguers at this time is coinciding with the owners not wanting to pay the major league players either. Wanting to shorten the season to 60 games, and the MLBPA suing them for that action. Essentially, simultaneously with the fact that minor leaguers are trying to fight to make their couple $1,000 a year too. And you know, my, my colleague, Michael Bauman, pointed out that one of the primary reasons that this is in MLBPAs interest from a qualitative but also quantitative perspective, is that if you have more minor leaguer, if you have the minor leagues in the union, that’s 5000 more members, and it’s 1200 unit group. That’s stronger by nature of the fact that there are more people to withhold their labor in the event that there is a circumstance that demands it. But it’s also like a way to educate the younger players on what the importance of the union is before they actually get thrown into it. And are trying to make their major league debut and are trying to stick in Major League Baseball. Like this is just a much cleaner and simpler way to unite these people who are all actually getting their paycheck from the same place doing the same thing, essentially. And I think it’s at that moment in March, April, May, June, as we started to talk more and more about minor league labor conditions and unionization of the minor leagues, that it just becomes obvious that these two groups interests are aligned. Though it wasn’t obvious to us In thinking back on it. Because you and I–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –in the many conversations that we had with people on the show, we’re never really sure that the MLBPA was going to do this. But I guess these forces that we’re talking about made it obvious enough to the people who are now in power, which has changed so much in the last few years with the–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –Major League Baseball Players Association.
ALEX: Right. And I think there are still plenty of questions about how these two groups are going to work together. Because there’s still noticeable differences in the conditions of major league players and, and minor league players, right? They still have different things that they’re fighting for, fundamentally, at least right now. And we’ll get into kind of some of those, some of those questions and how we think they’ll play out. But it’s clear that they at the very least decided, no matter what our differences are as a labor force, we have far more in common and far more to gain collectively if we come together, rather than twi- trying to wage these two fights separately. Like you’re saying that worker power is hugely, hugely important.
BOBBY: Yes. And from the minor leaguers side, you know, I think we talked about like, I think in the labor movement, we talked about the difference between these new unions that have cropped up like places like Amazon, or Starbucks, versus like some of the more long term, institutionally powerful unions, and what are the benefits of being in a brand new union and getting to restructure your union constitution in a certain way. And not having to retrofit it to a union that you might be trying to, to create a new local for or something like that. But in this specific case, it strikes me as intensely obvious how much more beneficial it is to join on with a Major League Baseball Players Association. How much easier it is to leverage their resources, to leverage their lawyers, to leverage the comfort level that they have going toe to toe with Major League Baseball, versus just trying to do go at it on your own. If you can point to the MLBPA and say, this is what they do for their members, this is what they’ll do for us. It’s kind of just a much easier sell to those people than trying to say, we honestly have no idea how it’s gonna go. We’re trying to do something that’s never been done before, or hasn’t been done since Marvin Miller, collectively united baseball players at the major league level over 50 years ago at this point.
ALEX: Yeah. And that basically brings us to where we are now, right? I mean, I, late last year, obviously Major League Baseball says, hey, we’re going to provide housing to all minor league players. I think, seeing the writing on the wall, they’re doing their best to stamp out any possibility that players might recognize their conditions and want to come together. It’s too little too late. Although it’s, it’s dope, that now they don’t have to fight for that in their unionization efforts, right? Because they can focus efforts elsewhere. So honestly, good on Major League Baseball for doing that in advance of the unionization. And, and just a couple short months later, in–
BOBBY: Rob probobly so mad about this.
ALEX: So mad about that, he’s like, are there take backs on that one?
BOBBY: No, takes these [38:22], actually can take that back, because it wasn’t given to them through any kind of collective bargaining. But it–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –would be tricky, legal territory for them to try to take that back now because it would basically just be retaliation for–
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: –forming a union.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Which, you know, is illegal in this country. But also, like, only kind of, you know, companies get away with it all the time.
ALEX: Right, exactly. That said, speaking of retaliation–
BOBBY: Here we go.
ALEX: –well, speaking of retaliation in the CBA, just in the CBA negotiations, a couple months later, Major League Baseball asks for the continued ability to reduce the number of minor league roster spots available to players going forward, right, just at their discretion. And MLBPA says no, right? So when you think about I know whether there were some questions floating around about like, you know, what might the league do? Will they shut down teams? Will they get rid of players that have you know, these these pro union sentiments or whatever? I mean, certainly they’re going to do their best to stamp out these efforts. But they can’t pull the Howard Schultz just starting to shut down stores move, right? Which I think is like big and indicates that this is something that maybe the PA was aware of even back in the CBA negotiations, they didn’t want to give them that, that weapon to- potentially wield against minor leaguers in the future.
BOBBY: So maybe this is a good point to start talking about what the near to medium term future will look like. Now of course There are a couple more moments on that timeline that have been covered extensively on this podcast. Like I mentioned, the Senate Judiciary Committee that the notion that–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –politically it’s unpalatable for MLB, to have this sort of antitrust exemption. And have it applied directly to low wage workers who are being left out of the minimum wage, which hasn’t gone up in this country since the mid 2000s. But we’ve covered, we’ve talked about that so much. So I want to talk a little bit about what it might look like for MLB to go scorched earth on this. Because a lot of people are already bringing up those possibilities. MLB might cut teams, they might try to restructure the minor leagues like they’ve been trying to do for the last two decades. They might say, actually playing games, in these smaller towns where we’re not raking in big gate receipts, or we don’t have big TV money pouring in for these teams. We don’t want them anymore, we might just have a bunch of pictures in the lab learning their spin rate and how to increase it. And their, their pitch profiles. We might send all of our hitters to the cages and to not actually see live pitching for the next three years, and then we’ll call them up. The Astros have been trying to do that for the last 10 years, essentially to save money for Jim Crane. And, and I think it’s important to point out that not every team has chosen to, tp go that route necessarily. Not every team has chosen to do away with scouts, not every team has chosen to develop players in this specific new tech way that doesn’t involve actually playing baseball. But even if every team wanted to do that, which I think a lot of owners probably would say, yeah, sure, I’ll save money by doing this. It’s not a change, that’s going to happen fast. You can’t just get rid of 42 minor league teams was a lot to get rid of at once. I don’t think that they could really sustain doing that a couple more times over the next couple of years, while trying to bleed out the prospective minor league, the prospective minor league players union or the prospective minor league wing of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Because at some point, you’re just going to not be able to develop good players anymore. At some point, if you start cutting all of these teams, where are you going to send your best prospects? Who are they going to play against? How are they going to get the necessary reps that they need to perform at the major league level? And performing at the major league level within those first six years is more important than it’s ever been.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: So I don’t think teams can really afford to just set fire to the minor leagues all within the next five years. Because of the unintended consequences of that. But they probably could do it within the next 20. So maybe the Major League Baseball Players Association was looking at at that and saying now’s the time to strike. You know, I know Tony Clark put in his letter. And in some of the quotes that have come out in the articles that I’ve been reading about this, that he thinks this is the time, this is the players. This is the set of circumstances, that’s the right time to do this. And part of that is probably what we saw with those 42 minor league teams getting cut. If they keep doing that, and doing that every few years, it just becomes a lot harder to accomplish this.
ALEX: Right. But I, but I think that’s just it, right, is that the Players Association, effectively is not allowing them to do that. At least as negotiated in this most recent CBA. That could change five years from now. But between that and the public scrutiny of the minority contraction, right? This Judiciary, this Senate Judiciary Committee, that’s taking a look at their antitrust exemption, it doesn’t really seem politically or even legally feasible for them to crack down in that manner. Which is not to say that they aren’t going to do their best to bring down the hammer, but they can’t necessarily do it in that sort of direct route, right? That just, that gets rid of the minor leagues entirely, which is, I think, a really good thing and it was a shrewd move of the players to not give them that ammo over the offseason during the CBA negotiations. I think they’re going to, I think the league is going to have to be kind of careful with their campaign, at least publicly. Because I thinkg they–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –recognize that the public opinion is not really in their favor in this one right now. And so it’s really going to be on infiltrating players and trying to spread that misinformation about the pros and cons of unionization. That to me is where I think this war will be waged is inside clubhouses, right? Trying to split players from each other. Trying to split the major and minor leaguers, trying to split individual teams. So that if it gets to this actual unionization vote of 50%, Major League Baseball can hope they won’t get there. Which I don’t think it’s gonna happen. But–
BOBBY: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what most companies try to do, they try to stop the union before it ever happens. So they don’t have to worry about all this other stuff that we’re talking about. And MLB will definitely try to do that, or they will at least dip their toes in the water of going full scorched earth now. I think you’re right, in that it’s a bad look to do that. And I think it’s a particularly tough sell to make now that that Players Association is involved.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Because something that happens a lot in these union propaganda efforts, is the company tries to make the argument, you’d rather dance with the devil, you know, than the devil you don’t. And you’ve been working for us this entire time. You know what it’s going to be like to work for us. But you don’t know what it’s going to be like when you bring in this third party, the union. And the union is bureaucratic, and that’s the new man. And they’re gonna want to take your wages, and they’re gonna want to have their own specific interests that they’re trying to advance. And there’s all of this like coded language about, what is the union trying to get out of this? And what agenda are they trying to advance? That argument doesn’t really hold a lot of weight when it’s the MLB Players Association. Because they didn’t have to do this. You know, we’ve been talking about it for basically the entire time, we’ve been talking about the minor league unionization effort, about how the, the PA, a lot of the times undercut the efforts of labor solidarity in the minor leagues. Historically speaking, not this necessarily this current iteration of the MLB pa leadership, both on the player and the union side. But the fact that they are openly willing to, to wage this fight right now, I, I have to imagine that the minor league players would much closer associate themselves with major league players than they would with owners, or management or, you know, minor league affiliates, and Rob Manfred. I find it hard to believe that they have a be- that they have a clear argument to make two minor leaguers than the players that these minor leaguers are trying to become. It’s a unique scenario that doesn’t exist in a lot of workplaces. And it’s part–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –of the reason that it makes sense that the PA wants to include them. The PA should include them, that it’s a mutually beneficial act of solidarity to do so.
ALEX: Right. And it does pose some interesting logistical questions about how these negotiations will go down, right? As you mentioned, the Players Association has been willing to throw amateur players and minor league players under the bus before to gain concessions from owners.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Now their fates are inextricably linked, right? Or they will be assuming the unionization efforts are successful. Any concessions that minor leaguers gain are going to be tied to anything that major league players may or may not gain, right? Because of–
BOBBY: Sure.
ALEX: –these, and it remains to be seen kind of the mechanics of this organization, whether or not they’ll simply, whether or not they’ll just simply join the PA or well that whether they’ll be kind of a their own organization under the umbrella of the, the Players Association, right? But they’re not just simply going to be tacked on to the existing CBA, right?
BOBBY: No.
ALEX: They’re going to, they’re going to nego- they’re going to negotiate their own. And so–
BOBBY: Ohh, I can’t wait to talk about those negotiations.
ALEX: I know. I know, right? But–
BOBBY: That’s gonna be a fucking minefield for us.
ALEX: It, they really is. But they’re beginning going to be going on simultaneously with Major League Baseball CBA negotiations.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: So I think that’s going to be a really interesting tension to watch play out, given that minor leaguers frankly have a lot more that they actually like, quote unquote, “need [48:56]”.
BOBBY: Yes. Yes, that now they will have a different, they will have a separate CBA. I don’t know what the structure of the union will be. I don’t think that they know what the structure of the union will be. I think they probably have–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –some ideas. Like for example, you know, the there’s a Writers Guild of America, West and the Writers Guild of America, East. And they there have been negotiations amongst those two parties about which, about which industries move you into one versus the other. And even though I was living in California, I was part of the East. Because I was a media worker, as opposed to I did not work in Hollywood on film or TV or anything like that. These are negotiations that happen amongst unions all the time. It’s not uncommon at all. And I think what’s interesting is that even though you could I, I guess credibly make the argument that whatever minor leaguers get in their CBA, owners will try to turn around and turn that right back on major leaguers and say, well, now we don’t have any money because we had to give it all to the minor leaguers, right? That’s bullshit, number one–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –which we all know. And number two, okay, so, so what are you going to do about that then? If you’re just going to cry poor and then we’re just going to not come to work. And if both CBAs are expired at the same time, guess who else is not coming to work?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: The minor leaguers, if you haven’t agreed on a CBA yet, guess who else is authorizing a strike? The minor leaguers. And so all of a sudden baseball completely grinds to a halt. Whatever scabs you’re going to try to pick off from the minor leagues, not allowed. Not allowed to do that anymore. Have fun trying to sign indie ballplayers to play for the New York Mets. So, you know, there at the same token like that arrangement, that arrangement also allows for more solidarity amongst those players. Their interests are intrinsically aligned now, as opposed to just conceptually aligned, as we discussed in this last CBA.
ALEX: Right, exactly. As a bit of an aside, this also has implications on the Senate Judiciary’s investigation into MLB’s antitrust exemption, right? Because unionized industries are exempt from antitrust challenges. Which is why the judiciary committee’s investigation was focused on the way that it impacted minor leaguers. So this very well renders that null and void. And if, if this comes to fruition, and kind of negates the necessity for it, obviously, the antitrust exemption would still be powerful in plenty of other realms in baseball. But like we’ve talked about when it comes to team relocation, as it comes to blackouts. But these are also negotiations that maybe aren’t as core to the economics of baseball as, as minor league unionization. And our wit and our wars that can be fought on other fronts.
BOBBY: I don’t think that would necessarily preclude the challenge, the legal challenge that we discussed with Jim Quinn, that he is sort of–
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: –heading up. I don’t think that would preclude that challenge from continuing all the way up to the Supreme Court if it was politically palatable the Supreme Court, which I honestly don’t really care about that right now, frankly.
ALEX: Right. It took me [52:05]–
BOBBY: Talking about what the Supreme Court is willing to hear or not hear.
ALEX: Right, exactly. It just means that argument and that approach might need to be tailored slightly differently, which is fine. There are plenty of smart legal minds out there who I think can, can make a pivot just fine.
BOBBY: We are not two of them. All right, Alex, why don’t we close here? We just, we would be remiss if we did this whole podcast without explicitly saying just how instrumental Advocates for Minor Leaguers has been. And the litany of media folks who have been talking about this, since before we even knew the structure of the minor league since we were still in high school, you know. People have been covering this for decades. People have been covering the business of baseball, and talking about how out of proportion minor league wages and conditions are compared to how important these players are to their organizations. Those people laid the groundwork that, you know, More Than Baseball was able to step into that Harry Marino, and Advocates for Minor Leaguers were able to step into. And without them, I’m not sure that I would go so far as to say none of this happens. But it definitely doesn’t happen on this accelerated timeline. I think back to–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –the episode that we did like a month ago now, for our five year anniversary, where we predicted five things would happen in the next five years. And one of those things that I predicted was minor league unionization. I definitely didn’t feel good about that happening in the first half of that five years. I was like that, uhm, maybe be like a later in my term sort of thing. Not, not in my first 100 days as president.
ALEX: [53:52]
BOBBY: This doesn’t happen without a groundswell of support from fans. That support is not as big without people like Advocates for Minor Leaguers. Without the players who actually spoke with Advocates for Minor Leaguers, the current love groves of the world, the Robert Stocks of the world. All these folks that we have referenced, being done with the cause while still being involved in baseball. And I just earnestly am pretty inspired by the speed at which this has taken off. It’s like one of the better things that’s ever happened in Major League Baseball since we’ve–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –been covering it–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –you know.
ALEX: Yeah. I am wondering, what are we doing now?
BOBBY: Like, what are you and I do?
ALEX: Yeah, like, I think this is, this is such a big part of our identity, right?
BOBBY: Right. Yeah.
ALEX: Unionizing the minors. We have to find a- [54:51].
BOBBY: Okay, first of all, it’s not over yet.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Second of all, easy win, is just making it past tense on the T shirts.
ALEX: Yup. Uh-hmm. 100%
BOBBY: Unionized the Minors.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: Though we didn’t really do that. But–
ALEX: We’re not claiming to have we are just simply saying they have been unionized.
BOBBY: Minors, Unionized. We can work this–
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: –the listeners, the listeners, the folks in the Slack will have plenty of notes for us, I’m certain.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I will say, this doesn’t bode well for all the people who were like, we want you to do Team X inspired.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah.
BOBBY: Unionize the Minors shirt.
ALEX: Not necessary anymore.
BOBBY: But I think that’s a concession that people are willing to make. Uhm, Alex, obviously, we will be covering this minute by minute.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Maybe not quite actually minute by minute. But episode by episode for our standards. There’s a reason that we decided to do this entire reaction podcast and push our normally scheduled programming back to Thursday this week. So a little bit of housekeeping just for the Tipping Pitches heads out there. If you’re new, and you’re listening to us for the first time, thank you. This was a weird time–
ALEX: [56:04]
BOBBY: –hop on board. But if you’re not, and you’re expecting a regular episode of Tipping Pitches, that regular episode will be coming out on Thursday. We have a really great conversation with a friend of the podcast, Matt Ritchie in that episode. So I hope that you will fire that one up when it drops into your feed later this week. And it’s just some excellent banter up top, which will now be 4 days stale. But we’re doing the best we can. So please allow us a little bit of grace when you go and listen to that podcast. We are trying to sketch out what our coverage of this story will be like over the next week, two weeks, month, months. Trying to talk to the relevant people and provide a clearer picture for, for folks out there who want it. But I hope that this was at least a start.
ALEX: I also just have to say that I’m sending my condolences to one Mike Schubert, we are officially no longer a Yankees podcast. You heard it here first. Never have been never will be. Except for that one fateful week in which the minor leagues were unionized.
BOBBY: The most important week in the history of the podcast and we lost a bet so that we had to put Tipping Pitches a Yankees podcast in our twitter name. You know, I thought that that was the least offensive option. And it turned out it was a pretty visible option. So I feel like–
ALEX: People, yeah.
BOBBY: –Mike, got his, his money’s worth.
ALEX: Absolutely.
BOBBY: Thanks to everybody who’s stuck with us through this whole, this whole journey. Alex, anything else to leave the people with? Other than a hearty, hell yeah! We’re unionizing in the minor leagues.
ALEX: Midnights by Taylor Swift coming out, October 21.
BOBBY: Imagine that’s the day that they voluntarily recognize the minor leaguers. Like these two events are like [57:58]–
ALEX: Like I [57:58], yeah.
BOBBY: –I always link, forever. Like it, like, at that point, I might believe like Taylor Swift like in the illuminati [58:03]–
ALEX: Just like actually–
BOBBY: –or something like that. Yeah.
ALEX: Like in is like a shadow funder of the MLBPA?
BOBBY: Well, maybe. Now, bear with me here, I’m just spitballing. But maybe all those flights, were actually her and Tony Clark going different places across the world to drum up interest in a Minor League Baseball Players Association.
ALEX: Maybe.
BOBBY: I don’t know.
ALEX: I just, I just choose not to acknowledge Taylor Swift’s carbon footprint.
BOBBY: I don’t know how we got here.
ALEX: I don’t either, but we fucking did, y’all!
BOBBY: Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you so much, so, so much, to everybody who has purchased shirts and stickers and reached out about our coverage of the story and our continuing coverage of this story and said congratulations to us even though we don’t need the congratulations, the players are the ones that should be getting the congratulations. But thank you so much to all of the energy and love and support and solidarity that people have been showing. Because it really means a lot and we’ve just gotten so many people buying shirts in the last couple of days. So if you are listening and you haven’t gotten a shirt and you want to get one while it’s, while you’re right in the thick of it.
ALEX: Yeah, this is gonna be vintage shit in six months.
BOBBY: Exactly. It’s tiny.cc\nationalize. Thank you everybody for listening. We’ll be back with another episode on Thursday. No idea whether we’ll have that episode between now and then or after that or between Thursday and next Monday. But of course more minor league labor coverage to come.
[59:35]
[Music]
[59:46]
[Outro]
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Hello everybody, I’m Alex Rodriguez, Tipping Pitches, Tipping Pitches. This is the one that I love the most, Tipping Pitches. So we’ll see you next week. See ya!
Transcriptionist: Vernon Bryann Casil
Editor: Krizia Marrie Casil
Tipping Pitches 
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