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You've landed your childhood dream job, or at least your dream job since your Little League coach pointed out you couldn't hit fastballs: you've been hired to work inside a Major League Baseball team's front office. You log long hours and stomach meager pay to climb the organizational ladder. Your performance is commended, to the point that you're told you're getting a new, more impressive title. Except the whole deal is a ruse. You've been had. The new title doesn't come with much of a raise, just a tether to keep you in place.
This is not a hypothetical for some MLB front-office employees. They, or someone they work with, have lived it. Though their careers may seem like dream jobs to outsiders, some of those who have been inside baseball tell a different story, one sprinkled with the pitfalls of working within a closed system.
Unlike in most other fields, front-office employees are not free to shop their labor or entertain competing offers in a meaningful manner. Teams must request permission to interview another club's worker while they're under contract; teams are under no obligation, however, to say yes, or to even inform the employee of outside interest. There is a tacit understanding that workers will be given the option to interview if the job is a clear promotion, yet the industry's rampant title inflation doubles, in a sense, as a control mechanism.
"[We're] going to make you Super Senior Director of X, we're going to make up that title for you,"...
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