Major League Baseball is in a lockout, and we don’t yet know what the new collective bargaining agreement between the owners and the players’ union will look like. However, we know this: It won’t require minor league players to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
It’s good to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Ideally, everyone would get vaccinated because it mitigates the spread and decreases their chances of dying. However, we can also acknowledge these are mostly physically fit men in their late teenage years and 20s with virtually no risk of dying from it.
And more importantly, MLB is not in any position to put increased expectations on minor leaguers.
This is the league that lobbied Congress to sneak the Save America’s Pastime Act deep into a 2018 omnibus spending bill that no one read. It’s a league that calls its minor leaguers seasonal workers and refuses to pay them a living wage, let alone minimum wage, despite the league raking in more than $10 billion in revenue in recent years (minus 2020, of course).
It’s Major League Baseball that needs these players. MLB needs a player development system so it can have people to play in the big leagues and keep the money flowing in the future.
If the league decides certain players can’t play because they refuse to get the jab, what will happen to them? Would they wait around, hope the league changes its mind, and keep going under a system that pays them poverty wages? Or would the players realize they probably won’t make it to the big leagues anyway, get a higher-paying job, and move on with their lives?
Maybe it would have been a mix of both. Thankfully, MLB won’t have to find out.
When it comes to minor leaguers, MLB should have a few priorities before it puts any added expectations on these young men: classify them as full-time employees and provide them with housing. The league should use its massive wealth to give people a reason to keep working hard and getting better — other than loving baseball and letting that passion be exploited.
More than 75% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. About “88% of minor leaguers were vaccinated during the 2021 season, according to a league official,” ESPN reports. If more players want to get vaccinated, that should be their choice, not the MLB’s.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
