MLB Must House Its Minor Leaguers Well
The plan reported by Jeff Passan sounds excellent on paper, but multiple minor league players told me its success will come down to MLB's implementation.
Jeff Passan’s report Sunday night that MLB will provide housing to minor league players starting in 2022 was met with widespread positive reaction. The issue has been gaining steam for the last several years, in part thanks to organizations like Advocates for Minor Leaguers and More Than Baseball: minor leaguers can make as little as $500 per week, and they’re only paid during the season. Housing often eats up so much of a minor leaguer’s paycheck that there’s barely enough left to live on, leaving players working second and third jobs, or simply leaving baseball altogether. For minor leaguers, finding and keeping housing can bring stress that distracts from the improvements they’re supposed to be making on the baseball field.
“People kind of forget that the issues start before the season,” one minor leaguer told me. “You have to scramble to find a place in a town you’ve never been to, hope to be making that team, hope those roommates you’ve picked are also making that team, hope there are no injuries that’ll mess that up, hope the apartment/house you’re trying to rent actually accepts you as a renter, being that most players don’t normally have the best renter credentials, then once you go out, hope you picked a spot that’s in a good area.”
Finding and paying for housing is a struggle for minor leaguers — which is why many of them were excited, or even elated, to read Passan’s report.
“I’m definitely happy about this news!” one player said.
“It’s awesome!” another player told me. “It’ll help us a ton during the season.”
“Fantastic news,” another player said.
But several players added a caution: it’s all about the details. According to Passan’s report, the specifics of the program haven’t been decided yet. It’s not clear, for instance, whether teams will cover housing through a stipend, reimbursement, or simply providing rooms to each player. Multiple players told me that the success of the program will come down to implementation.
“We’ll have to see what the plan actually is,” one player said, summing up the sentiment.
“There will be programs that do a great job with this, and it’ll be a huge step up for the players,” another player said. “But other teams are going to do a horrible job. I would love to see what the rules and regulations are going to be.”
One player raised a different, but related, point: one way to look at the reported program is that Minor League Baseball is avoiding simply paying its players enough to make housing a non-issue. “I find it kind of funny that we are bending over backwards to just not pay players a semi-normal professional minor league wage like the NBA does with their players,” he said. NBA G-League players make a base salary of $35,000 over their five-month season (many make significantly more), plus the costs of housing and insurance.
Even that player, though, acknowledged that the program, if implemented successfully, would be a game-changer.
“It’ll be a pretty big deal,” he said. “The ability to not worry about figuring out rent in a city you may or may not be living in takes a huge amount of stress off of Spring.”
All in all, it seems that the program’s success will come down to how committed MLB is to making it happen. If teams really want the program to succeed, it shouldn’t be that difficult: according to Passan’s report, the total cost of housing every minor leaguer will be less than $1 million per team. That’s less than 1/30th of every MLB team’s payroll.
But if MLB cares more about the headline than the results, if it cares more about housing minor leaguers cheaply than housing them well, the program will run into problems.
The program is already facing its first test. Only hours after Passan’s report first came out, MLB released a statement. “In mid-September,” it read, “the owners discussed the issue of player housing and unanimously agreed to begin providing housing to certain minor league players.”
Certain minor league players? That sounds like a walk back. If MLB wants credit for housing minor leaguers, it has to do it right. It can’t nickle and dime; just house the players. That’s it. If minor league players are “housed” in name only, MLB will have utterly failed. Right now, baseball has a chance to do something excellent: it can eliminate an enormous stressor for minor leaguers, and keep players in the game who might otherwise leave. Minor League players don’t quite trust baseball to actually take steps to help them. Right now, baseball has a chance to prove the players wrong, and make their day in the process. The plan that Passan reported is exactly what MLB should do. Now it just needs to do it.