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Jeff Passan, ESPN
Sen. Dick Durbin plans to introduce the Fair Ball Act, a bill that would further protect minor league baseball players from previous legislation that exempted them from wage and hour laws, sources told ESPN on Wednesday.
In the bill, Durbin (D-Illinois), who has been an outspoken advocate for minor league players and is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, promotes rolling back the exemption granted by the Save America’s Pastime Act (SAPA), whose inclusion in a 2018 spending bill allowed teams to avoid abiding by the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Should the Fair Ball Act pass, players would be entitled to minimum wage and overtime laws in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement.
Minor league players, who unionized with the Major League Baseball Players Association in September 2022, struck a deal with MLB on a collective bargaining agreement in March 2023 and drastically increased salaries and benefits after years of below minimum wage pay.
“Workers deserve a fair playing field everywhere — including in baseball,” Durbin said in a statement. “Executives at MLB lobbied Congress hard for federal wage and hour law exemptions in order to avoid legal liability with the 2018 Save America’s Pastime Act. While I commend MLB for voluntarily recognizing the unionization of Minor League Baseball players in 2022, it is time to roll back SAPA in deference to the gains made by that historic unionization. I’m proud to stand with these workers, unions and the integrity of the sport. I stand ready to pass the Fair Ball Act into law.”
MLB declined comment when reached by ESPN.
The treatment of minor leaguers led to a class-action lawsuit in 2014 by players, who argued that MLB teams had run afoul of labor laws. Two years later, SAPA was introduced by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) to exempt MLB teams from having to pay minimum wage to players, who made as little as $1,000 per month and were paid during the season only. While SAPA never gained traction in Congress, its language was included in a spending bill passed in 2018.
The unionization of the minor leagues lifted minimum salaries, ranging from $19,800 per year for players at teams’ complexes (previously $4,800) to $35,800 at Triple-A (previously $17,500). MLB later agreed to pay $185 million to settle the class-action lawsuit.
“For generations, minor league players’ working conditions were indefensible,” MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said in a statement. “This indignity was compounded by the perversely named Save America’s Pastime Act — a law that was enacted to save money, not baseball, by depriving minor leaguers of a minimum wage. By narrowing the act so that it applies only when players are protected by a CBA, the Fair Ball Act is a win not just for minor leaguers, but for the institution of collective bargaining as a whole.”
The contraction of more than 40 minor league teams before the 2021 season and past treatment of players continue to resonate, and the Fair Ball Act — which is also being sponsored by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Peter Welch (D-Vermont) — is intended to keep MLB from using SAPA as a leverage point during negotiations after the minor league agreement expires following the 2027 season.
The current session of Congress ends Jan. 3, 2025, and with judicial appointments, a spending bill and disaster aid among the current legislative priorities, the Fair Ball Act could be pushed to the next session or, like SAPA, folded into a larger bill.
“What made the Save America’s Pastime Act so bad, is it was Exhibit A for how American politics should not work,” Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league player and lawyer who filed the antitrust suit, told ESPN. “It didn’t have a committee hearing. It was snuck in on page 1,967 of the bill in the dark of night. Most of the congressmen and congresswomen didn’t know it was in there when they were voting for it. It was an example of rich people getting special treatment at the expense of their workers.
“This opportunity to narrow that exemption is overdue, and I commend Sen. Durbin, the MLBPA and all the others who have been working on this.”