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Vanderbilt Law Review

First Page

1341

Abstract

For years, minor league baseball players received salaries far below the federal minimum wage, despite working sixty hours per week. It was not uncommon for these professional athletes to share cramped hotel rooms, sleep on floors, or live out of their cars. Most had to secure loans and pursue odd jobs to make ends meet during the offseason. Such sacrifices were necessary for minor leaguers to achieve their dreams of reaching the major league level, particularly as those abysmal working and living conditions became entrenched by adverse legislation and judicial rulings.

Only within the last five years have minor leaguers experienced material improvements in pay and working conditions, thanks primarily to the first-ever unionization and ensuing collective bargaining agreement in minor league baseball history. But they have yet to reach home plate. Recent actions from Major League Baseball, most pertinently, its revamp of the minor leagues in 2020, evince its intent to remove Major League Baseball affiliation from up to half of minor league teams upon expiration of that collective bargaining agreement. The resulting circumstances for players and teams stripped of their major league affiliation—that is, those who have been “contracted”—largely mirror the circumstances of minor league baseball’s pre-union “dark days.”

This Note defends against Major League Baseball’s unilateral, capital-driven action by arguing that the number of affiliated minor league teams constitutes a mandatory subject of bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act. Beyond offering the Major League Baseball Players Association a new pitch in its arsenal to advocate for overturning baseball’s historic antitrust exemption, a ruling that contraction is a mandatory bargaining subject is necessary to ensure the continued viability of minor league baseball.

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