Every professional baseball player grew up dreaming of the chance to play the game at the highest level, but the business of the sport offers most of them a rude awakening. Even the best players can be put off by their organizations’ attempts to haggle and manipulate their careers based on loopholes, as we saw with Kris Bryant’s protracted service-time grievance.
When it comes to minor league players who aren’t even earning living wages in many cases, however, the stakes are decidedly different. Unless we’re talking about top draft picks who earn big bonuses to sign, most of the thousands of players on the farm are scraping by on their meager salaries and making ends meet by rooming with several teammates.