MLB sued by former minor league players over below minimum wages
If you're a baseball fan, there's nothing quite like this time of year. But it's an especially cold time of year for the couple of thousand minor league players watching far from the dugouts.
As another pro season comes to a close, it's time for them to think long and hard about whether they want to spend another year grinding it out, and wondering whether their own big league break will ever come. Because, while major league ball players sign multi-million dollar contracts to play in "the show," minor league players earn less than sales clerks.
Garrett Broshuis thinks that's not only wrong, but illegal. He's a former minor league baseball player turned lawyer. And he is bringing a class action law suit against Major League Baseball, arguing it is breaking the law by not paying minor league players the legally mandated minimum wage. Garrett Broshuis was in St. Louis.
Major League Baseball turned down our request for an interview or comment.
At the beginning of this season, about a third of all major league players were born outside of the United States. The overwhelming majority of those foreign players came from the Dominican Republic and -- increasingly -- from Venezuela. And critics say the way Major League Baseball operates in those countries is deeply troubling.
Arturo Marcano Guevara is a writer for ESPN Deportes, a spanish-language sports television channel. He wrote some of the earliest critical studies of Major League Baseball's practices when it was first establishing a presence in the Dominican Republic in the 1990s. Arturo Marcano Guevara is originally from Venezuela but he lives in Toronto now.
Derrick Hall is the President and CEO of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and was instrumental in launching a program meant to ensure all of the Diamondbacks' Dominican prospects are able to earn a high school diploma while they're playing at the club's baseball academy in the Dominican.
This segment was produced by The Current's Gord Westmacott.