This week’s episode: Minor league pay 

From the Frisco RoughRiders to the Dayton Dragons, minor league baseball teams are a classic American tradition. But their players are not covered by some classic American laws: Players can earn less than the equivalent of minimum wage and don’t get paid overtime. We explore how that’s even possible with our colleagues at Marketplace podcast The Uncertain Hour.

Crying foul 

Peter Balonon-Rosen grew up attending games of the Rochester Red Wings, the minor league baseball team in his hometown. Last year, he realized many minor league players make less than the equivalent of minimum wage. Major League Baseball, which runs both the major and minor leagues, has said players are “trainees,” so they don’t have the same rights as regular employees. When courts shot down that argument, the MLB set out to change federal law.

Peter dug into how the MLB has exploited loopholes in federal law to get around paying minimum wage and overtime and produced an episode for The Uncertain Hour, which is airing on Reveal this week. 

I caught up with Peter to learn more about his reporting.

Did you start reporting this story because you’re a big baseball fan or because you’re interested in the legal issues here? 

Peter Balonon-Rosen: I’m honestly not a huge sports fan. But I did have an affinity for minor league baseball because I grew up around it. This past summer, I started seeing these articles about how 40 minor league teams were going to get cut. There was a reference to this class-action lawsuit of minor league players who were not getting paid the minimum wage. I was like, “Hold up!” I knew that it’s a grind for players, but I had no idea it was at this level. When I was growing up, I always wanted to go to games – you could get a ticket for, like, five bucks. I had no idea that behind the scenes, there's this history of shady policies.

What do you think baseball fans should do about this? 

So on one level, there's this cool program called Adopt a Minor Leaguer. Literally because these guys are paid so poorly, you can sponsor minor league players and buy them groceries and give them a stipend every month. There’s literal hosting, where someone stays at your house, but then also you just send one player $100 every month or whatever to spend on groceries or so they can buy new shoes. When the pandemic happened and the whole season was canceled, that program became very crucial for a lot of these guys who've lost a lot of their income.

That actually sounds pretty dark to me. Since the players aren’t paid enough, fans are having to make up the difference? 

It is very dark. It’s like, “How do we make a broken, sad system as comfortable as possible, since the system's not going to change?” I think on a larger level, awareness is really important. The way that this (employment) law was changed was that baseball team owners and lobbyists from the MLB went and asked representatives to rewrite law. If people have feelings about this, they can make that known to their representatives. 

Last question: If you were drafted onto a baseball team, what position would you play? 

Oh, God, they would probably put me on like, way out in left field, because you wouldn’t want me to do too much. I’m not good at hand-eye coordination. 

Listen to the episode: Minor league pay

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Behind the scenes: Meet Nina Martin, Reveal’s new features editor! 

Nina Martin was a very rule-abiding teenager. The only time she cut class in high school was to see a new movie: “All the President’s Men.” Watching the Watergate scandal unfold in real time is what got Nina interested in becoming a journalist someday. After a storied three-decade career, Nina started as Reveal’s new features editor this month. 

Nina grew up in a Puerto Rican family from Hawaii and spent her adolescence in Tacoma, Washington, when her dad, a service member, was transferred to McChord Air Force Base. When she moved to the East Coast to attend Princeton University, it was a huge culture shock. “Princeton was very, very strange compared to the world that I had come from,” Nina says. The students she gravitated toward were the staff of the school paper. Nina started her journalism career as a sports reporter, covering the women’s volleyball team. After grad school at Northwestern, she landed a job at The Baltimore Sun, where she learned she didn’t want to be a quick-turn daily news reporter, but someone who does long, in-depth storytelling. 

Over the years, Nina followed her curiosity and covered numerous beats at various publications, both as a reporter and an editor. “I've done it all. I've covered legal affairs, parenting issues, politics, culture, art, food. I think that the ability to learn from all of that and absorb all of those experiences is really what kept me interested in journalism,” she says. The thread connecting all her work is a lens that focuses on i gender and race. Most recently, Nina worked as the sex and gender reporter at ProPublica, where she worked on a powerful project called Lost Mothers, which examined high maternal mortality rates in the United States. She also reported on the criminalization of drug use in pregnancy and racial and gender disparities in COVID-19 deaths.

Nina lives in Berkeley, California, with her partner, Alex, two rescue dogs and her 18-year-old daughter, Lucy, who seems to be following in the family journalism tradition and is currently interning at Boston NPR station WGBH. At Reveal, Nina won’t have a specific beat, but aims to have her work as an editor amplify the interests of the reporters she’ll work with. “What I'm interested in is connecting with the people I'm working with, understanding what they're doing and what drives them, and how I can help support that. I don't like to be pigeonholed, and I don't want to pigeonhole anybody.” 

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Elena Neale-Sacks is an audio journalism grad student at UC Berkeley and a research assistant at Reveal. She is helping with a large enterprise story (that we can’t say anything about yet but will be published this spring). 

Listening: I've been obsessively listening to the podcast In the Dark by APM Reports for the last month. In each season, the reporters and producers do an amazing job of re-investigating criminal cases that were investigated poorly by the police and district attorneys, and the narratives are incredible.

Reading: I recently finished “The Mountain Shadow,” which is the sequel to “Shantaram,” a fictionalized autobiography of a Australian bank robber who escaped prison and fled to India. I love these books because the stories themselves are wildly absurd, but the writing is beautiful.

Watching: Oh man, I've plunged down the “Survivor” hole lately … not the highest-quality TV show, but I enjoy the strategy involved, plus it's a nice mental break.

You can keep up with Elena on Twitter at @elenaneale17.