Minor League Baseball Wins a Union

In the winter of 2022, 38-year old starting pitcher Max Scherzer – a 3-time Cy Young Award winner, and a sure-fire future Hall of Famer – signed a contract with the New York Mets that paid him $43 million a year.  That’s the highest annual salary in baseball history.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the baseball career ladder, young players starting out try to get by on as little as $4,800 a year.  For years, baseball has treated minor leaguers more like indentured servants than skilled professional athletes.  That may be beginning to change.  In July of 2022 Major League Baseball settled a lawsuit that paid $185 million to 23,000 minor league players.  Now, the Major League Baseball Players Association, the majors’ baseball union, has announced that it has succeeded in its minor league union drive, and will start collective bargaining with baseball owners on behalf of minor league players.  Simon Rosenblum-Larson is a righthanded pitcher who pitched three seasons for Harvard University, and two seasons for the amateur Madison Mallards.  In 2018, he was drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays and has spent three seasons in Tampa Bay’s minor league system.  He is also the co-founder of More Than Baseball, an international nonprofit seeking to better the lives of minor league baseball players.