Earlier this month, pitcher Adam Oller of the Oakland Athletics trotted out to the mound for the first major-league appearance of his professional career. The 27-year-old Oller had spent six years in the minor leagues. Each offseason, he worked two jobs, Oller told a reporter last fall, because “with what we make in a month, I don’t think it’s possible to end the season positive.” His major-league debut gives Oller a piece of the $700,000 per year minimum big-league salary.
Since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed of doing what Oller did. I worked my way from being a skinny high-schooler with a good curveball to attracting the attention of big-league scouts. In 2018, I was selected in the 19th round of the major-league draft. After my first game as a professional ballplayer, I went home to a cot squeezed into a 10-by-12-foot room that I shared with a teammate in a house set up by our team. A few weeks later, I received my first check, for two weeks of work: $550, before taxes and clubhouse dues.
Annual salaries for minor-league baseball players — there are about 7,000 of us — range between $4,800 at the rookie-ball levels to about $14,000 in Triple-A. We earn nothing during the offseason or in the grueling, seven-days-a-week spring training. In just the past week, we received our first paychecks since the end of the 2021 season. In 2019, the most recent season reported, Major League Baseball had $10.7 billion in revenue.
In the minors, I’ve watched a teammate skip breakfast for a...
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