We are in what would have been the final week of the minor league season — except we don’t have a minor league season in 2020 — and on Wednesday, there was some dispute about Angels minor leaguers not getting paid.
Advocates for Minor Leaguers, an organization headed by former minor league pitcher Garrett Broshuis, tweeted that some Angels minor leaguers weren’t paid in August.
Angels said they’d be paying $400/week stipends to MiLBers through August. That was false. Several players have told us they didn’t see a dime from the Angels last month. No other MLB team has shown such apathy toward providing for players' basic needs.
— Advocates for Minor Leaguers (@MiLBAdvocates) September 2, 2020
The Angels later clarified this issue, saying that every minor leaguer was paid up to what their salary would have been for the season in the minors, which this year would have ranged between $290 per week in Class-A to $502 per week in Triple-A, per the Associated Press.
For players who would have been in Triple-A, for instance, they get the $400 weekly stipend through this week. For others, they stopped getting paid already.
The problem is illustrated by Alden Gonzalez of ESPN:
Garrett Brohsius, the lawyer who co-founded Advocates for Minor Leaguers, said: “I’m not aware of any other team doing it this way.” He says other teams are simply paying every minor leaguer a $400-a-week stipend through August.
— Alden Gonzalez (@Alden_Gonzalez) September 2, 2020
From Jeff Fletcher at the Orange County Register:
“We aren’t aware of any other team taking this approach,” Broshuis said, adding that “it seems like the Angels didn’t convey this information” to the players.
I’m not sure exactly how many minor leaguers are in the Angels system, but let’s overshoot and say there are 250 players. Simply paying all of them the $400 stipend would cost $100,000 per week. Paying all minor leaguers since the beginning of August would be roughly $500,000.
Yes, half a million is a lot of money, but the Angels are paying some of that already anyway for the higher-level minor league players. Plus, they saved over $1.5 million in the trades of Jason Castro, Tommy La Stella, and Brian Goodwin before the trade deadline.
Couple this nickel and diming of minor leaguers with the reported “aggressively furloughing” of several employees per a May report by Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic, it fits a pattern, and it’s not a good look for the Angels and owner Arte Moreno.
Links & notes
- The Angels on Tuesday night received left-handed pitcher Jose Salvador as the player to be named later from the Reds to complete the Brian Goodwin trade. Salvador, who turns 21 on September 21, had a 4.81 ERA in 58 innings for two rookie league teams in Cincinnati’s system in 2019, with 72 strikeouts and 19 walks. Salvador was rated the Reds’ 29th-best prospect by FanGraphs, and was not rated in the team’s top 30 prospects in Baseball America’s midseason updated rankings.
- Werner Blakely, the Angels fourth-round draft pick this year, was profiled by Cody Kulge at BVM Sports. “I feel like my ceiling is really high. I definitely have a lot of upside and feel like I’m still raw. I think it’ll be very interesting to see the type of player that I am at 21, 22, 23 if I am fortunate enough to get to the big leagues,” Blakely said.