“Inside the Game, You Are Still a Commodity”

Author: Dirk Hayhurst / Source: jacobinmag.com

There has been plenty of talk recently about exploitation in Minor League Baseball, in no small part because of the passage last year of the Save America’s Pastime Act. The law exempts Major League Baseball, a $12 billion annual business, from paying minor leaguers overtime.

What this means in practice is that athletic laborers who work fifty to seventy hours per week for five months of the year can be paid as little as $7.25 per hour for a forty-hour workweek (and receive no pay for spring training). Professional baseball players might strike it rich by scrapping their way to the MLB, but even in that best-case scenario, they will have practically served time as indentured labor en route. On top of poor working conditions, professional athletes also often grapple with emotional troubles commonly overlooked by fans.

Dirk Hayhurst is a former Major League and Minor League Baseball player, the author of The Bullpen Gospels, and a former baseball analyst for print and television. Nathan Kalman-Lamb — a lecturing fellow at Duke University and the author of Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom, and the Business of Sport — recently caught up with him to talk about the question of exploitation in Minor League Baseball and other professional sports, as well as the seldom-discussed emotional consequences of a career in athletic labor.

NKL

You’ve written about the brutal working conditions during your experiences in the minors. But I want to talk about something a little different: the emotional costs of minor league professional sports. Professional athletic careers demand more of players than we usually acknowledge, and those physical and emotional sacrifices benefit both the owners in pro sports and the fans who derive meaning and pleasure from these supposed games.

DH

Are there emotional costs to playing baseball? Sure. But there are emotional costs to every job. Every job has a cost; a cost to get in, an opportunity cost to continue it, and a cost you pay for being exposed to it for years. What I feel is unique to professional sports is that part of the cost paid to play is the alienation it brings between you and those on the outside of it; the amount of distance it puts between you and those who consume your labor.

If I sit down with you and tell you about a hard day teaching; how the kids and their parents are frustrating, you’ll hear me. You can relate. “Kids today …” you might say.

If I tell you how hard it is playing a kid’s game for a living with a shot at fame, money, and fun — you’ll tell me stop whining.

Indeed, you’ll get that in your own locker room, from your own teammates. There is very little sympathy for your perceived hardships, struggles, or emotions in professional sports — internally or externally, and that has a real consequence on a player’s ability to understand themselves emotionally, relate and connect to others, and find healthy coping mechanisms.

NKL

There is no question that the players I spoke to understood the centrality of their relationship with fans to the entire construct of professional hockey and that had major implications for their experiences as people and workers. It was no mystery to them that if fans didn’t get what they wanted out of the spectacle of professional hockey, then there would be no more professional hockey.

As one player I talked to put it, “Most of the time, fans don’t really know the real reasons why the athletes are not performing. You’re watching the games and what you think is that all the athletes are on the same page and all feeling good, all have lives without problems, but it’s never the fact, you know? … It could be health, it could be injuries, it could be something related to his home life, his family and things like that, and people are not aware of that.”

Why do you think it is that so many fans aren’t able to appreciate what players go through?

DH

To start, a common misnomer is that when you become a professional baseball player — at any level — you become rich. As soon as you sign that pro contract, your life is presumed to become what people see and hear about on nightly broadcasts: the signing bonuses, the sponsorships, the star treatment.

However, life in the lowest levels of the game is often a brutal one. Very few players are paid livable wages. Very few get a noteworthy signing bonus. And very few will ever make it to the top of the sport. Even now, as I think of all the times I’ve tried to explain the simple but well-documented truth about life in the minors, I can hear what I’ve heard so many times before echo in my head: “Yes, but you’re living your dream.”

That’s categorically false. My dream and almost every single dream of every person I’ve ever known in baseball was not to be a poor minor leaguer piling up debt so we could brag in a bar about glory days. Our dream was to be grossly overcompensated for playing a game we love at the highest level.

Ironically, when I say this, I draw out a response from fans similar to the way a zealous believer might react to sacrilege: “Well, then you’re playing for the wrong reasons, because you should be doing it for the love of the game.”

The love of the game is a fascinating concept. It suggests that you’d play baseball for free, if they let you. And believe me, “they” would. They’d prefer to get you as cheap as possible. While someone on the outside of the game may see you as a hero in uniform, or a role model and the like, inside the game, you are still a commodity. You are bought and sold and traded. No matter how you dress it up, or how much poetry you…

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