2009
It’s a chilly night in San Jose, and Municipal Stadium’s stands are dotted with a couple thousand fans munching cheap hot dogs amid organ bleats. The San Jose Giants mascot, Gigante, an ape-like creature with blazing-orange mutton chops, holds court behind a dugout. Summertime escapes like this one are playing out on this night across scores of small American cities—those bastions of minor league baseball where cotton candy air and peanut shell crunches unburden fans’ brains, where no-name dreamers toss around a cowhide orb on a field that feels less like a stage and more like a lazy backdrop you can almost touch.
On the mound, southeast Missouri native Garrett Broshuis, toe searching for the rubber, enters the windup to deliver his first pitch. He has just been called in from the bullpen. The bullpen.
Broshuis couldn’t stomach the ignominy. Just a year before, the 6-foot-3 right-hander was a starting pitcher for the San Francisco Giants’ Double-A affiliate—a level above San Jose’s Single-A—where he finished second in the league for wins. He’d taken a perfect game into the seventh and fanned David Ortiz, the Boston Red Sox legend, during the slugger’s rehab stint in the minors. Three years before that, Broshuis was the Giants organization’s Single-A Pitcher of the Year and a Top 30 prospect. He finished that season in Triple-A, the highest tier in the minors, just a Texas League bloop from making it to the big show.
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Missouri pitcher Garrett Broshuis (40) throws in the first inning against Oklahoma during the Big 12 Conference championship tournament in Arlington, Texas, Wednesday, May 26, 2004. Missouri won 9-5. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
But now, five years after being drafted by the Giants in the fifth round, Broshuis had been demoted back to San Jose—and as a reliever, to boot. This was never the plan for the collegiate All-American, who led Mizzou to the Big 12 championship during his junior year with an 11–0 record. Standing on the mound in San Jose, the 27-year-old felt less like a prospect and more like an old man, a depth-chart filler. His teammates called him Grandpa. His bank account drained by years of woeful wages that put him below the poverty line, he’d moved in with a host family even though he was married. If his life had been a movie, his character would’ve been Crash Davis—the journeyman catcher played by Kevin Costner in Bull Durham—who, feeling ancient on his first day on a new team, questioned his manager, Why the hell am I back in A-ball?
Broshuis couldn’t close out the game that night in San Jose, but 12 years later, he finds himself staring down a new baseball opponent. And this time he’s waging his battle from St. Louis.
After hanging up his minor league cleats in 2010, Broshuis earned a full scholarship to Saint Louis University School of Law, graduated No. 1 in his class, and joined the downtown firm Korein Tillery. During Broshuis’ transition into law, his mind never strayed from the game, though his memories weren’t entirely fond. He’d grown increasingly incensed by the players’ meager salaries. Some teammates were crammed six to a two-bedroom flat. Others skipped breakfast to pay rent. Talented prospects quit. As a lawyer, Broshuis wanted to help folks who were facing inequities. Perhaps he could help minor leaguers themselves.
In 2014, the former pitcher threw the equivalent of a brushback pitch at Major League Baseball. Broshuis’ firm filed a class-action lawsuit against MLB and most of its clubs, alleging that minor league players are paid below minimum wage. The lawsuit called for one of the most radical changes in minor league baseball since its inception in 1901.
The case bounced up and down the system, with appeals all the way to the Supreme Court. Now, after seven years, it has finally been calendared for trial next June.
The trial is slated to open at an inflection point for the minor leagues. This past December, MLB wrested power from the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the longtime minor league governing body, and cut the number of affiliate teams from 160 to 120, leaving more than 1,000 players—25 percent of its workforce—without jobs. Some of the 42 teams cut by MLB have scrambled to join amateur leagues; others simply folded.
In the meantime, Broshuis’ case has attracted the attention of labor law experts and minor league stakeholders. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has weighed in, claiming that the national pastime should not be “a business where you can pay people low wages and shut down enterprises in communities where it means so much to the kids and the families.” According to Robert M. Jarvis, a professor at Nova Southeastern University’s law school and co-author of Baseball and the Law, the case marks the largest-ever legal attempt to empower minor league ballplayers.
“Minor leaguers have always been the serfs of baseball,” says Jarvis. “They have no rights or power, even though they’re very important to their home cities. This lawsuit, in that respect, is the shot heard ’round the world.”
2020
It’s the middle of a global pandemic, and the 39-year-old Broshuis is quarantined in his University City home. He’s hosting a Zoom call with approximately 100 minor leaguers, teaching them how to file for unemployment. The coronavirus will soon wipe away the minor league season, forcing a bevy of contract suspensions and releases.
Broshuis is facilitating the Zoom session through Advocates for Minor Leaguers, a nonprofit he co-founded in 2019 to give players an organizational platform. (Unlike their counterparts in basketball, soccer, and hockey, minor league baseball players aren’t part of a union.) In the meantime, the organization offers practical lessons for players on how to handle team conflicts or navigate the pandemic.
“Guys are struggling,” Broshuis says over the phone from his home, where he lives with his wife and children, shortly after the session. “Applying for unemployment is not easy, especially if you’re 19 or 20.” (Earlier this year, Broshuis brought in a director and stepped away from his nonprofit to focus on the upcoming trial.)
Those who know Broshuis describe him as folksy, measured, matter-of-fact. He ends conversations with “We’ll see ya.” Despite his workload, none of it seems to matter when he’s coaching his first-grader’s Little League team. “He’s soft-spoken, extremely smart, very hardworking, very dedicated, and just an all-around excellent lawyer,” says Michael Wolff, a retired Missouri Supreme Court chief justice who warmed to Broshuis during his tenure as dean of SLU Law and still remembers the student’s valedictorian speech. “He’s not flashy … Well, maybe a 95-mph fastball makes you a little flashy.”
Even as a student editing the school’s law journal, Broshuis hinted at his future fight. “He came in with this passion,” Wolff recalls. “I was, like, ‘Wait a minute, these players don’t make minimum wage? They’re not doing much better than baggers at the grocery store?’ They might be working as baggers at the grocery store.”
Broshuis filed the lawsuit in the Northern District of California and argued that MLB was violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, which governs minimum-wage and overtime laws. In 2018, according to The Athletic, the average Single-A annual salary was $6,000. Double-A was $9,350, and Triple-A was $15,000. The federal individual poverty line is $12,760. Contrast those numbers with MLB’s minimum salary of $570,500, a league where All-Stars make tens of millions and annual revenues exceed $10 billion. Spending a single day in the majors on the prorated minimum salary is worth more than a month in the minors.
Earlier this year, after shedding a quarter of its workforce, MLB raised minimum salaries for minor leaguers between 38 and 72 percent, bumping salaries across the minimum-wage threshold if one accounts solely for the five-month baseball season. But for many players, that’s still shy of the poverty line if stretched across the 12-month calendar year, Broshuis notes. He argues that minor leaguers should be paid at least $15,000 a year, plus overtime for workweeks that can run up to 70 hours. Minor leaguers don’t earn a paycheck during the off-season, instructional leagues, or the seven-week spring training period. “This fight is about ensuring that Major League Baseball is paying its minor leaguers in accordance with basic minimum-wage laws,” he says.
MLB has contended that minor leaguers are akin to seasonal apprentices learning a craft, on par with musicians, actors, and lifeguards. According to Victor A. Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross economist and co-author of The Economics of Sports, “Baseball’s argument is that these players are trainees—that they’re nobodies in the minors and we’re giving them an opportunity to play in the Bigs. You can take that gamble or not. It’s no different than the intern starting in the mailroom and wanting to become CEO.”
Players counter that, unlike a mailroom clerk, their performance generates revenue, and there’s nothing seasonal in modern-day professional baseball. “It’s become a year-round training ground,” says William B. Gould IV, a Stanford Law School professor who helped resolve the 1995 players’ strike as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. “Players in the 1940s might drive a milk truck in the offseason. The players of today are not doing that.”
MLB and its lawyer Elise Bloom did not respond to several messages about this story. In a statement last year, the league said it doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation but “remains focused on modernizing its player development system to enhance the minor league experience for players, including providing them with renovated facilities, reduced travel, and improved daily working conditions.” A Cardinals spokesman also declined to comment on litigation matters.
As Broshuis’ lawsuit wended its way through the system, a victorious appeal in 2019 gave him representation of three classes comprising thousands of former and current minor leaguers. The classes cover three states: Florida and Arizona (where spring training leagues are held) and California. Filed against MLB and 22 of its clubs, the suit has dozens of named plaintiffs, including former Mizzou pitcher Aaron Senne. “You shouldn’t have to make a decision as a talented young ballplayer that you can’t pursue your dream because you can’t get by on below minimum wage,” says Senne, who left the game and is now a project manager in Denver.
Broshuis’ quest hit a roadblock in 2018, when Congress, on the verge of a shutdown, tucked a provision into a 2,000-page omnibus spending bill that exempted minor leaguers from Fair Labor Standard Act protections. Titled the Save America’s Pastime Act, the provision, supported by minor league governing chiefs, passed without public debate. It was written shortly after MLB quadrupled its lobbying efforts, according to the Associated Press.
Broshuis learned about the new legislation from a Washington Post reporter seeking comment and was caught off guard. “Most of the people who voted for that bill probably had no idea that provision was in there,” he posits. “It exemplifies how our government is working: You can sneak something into an omnibus bill, if you have the right connections, in the dark of night.”
Experts agree that the legislation was a reaction to Broshuis’ lawsuit. “Major League Baseball’s immediate response was to create a lobbying office in Washington and spend millions a year to get the act passed,” says Nola Agha, a University of San Francisco sports economist.
“No question it got Congress’ attention,” says Pat O’Conner, the longtime head of the minor league governing body who retired just before MLB took control. He opposes Broshuis’ lawsuit because of its overtime demands. “I just don’t know how you calculate that,” he says. Is batting practice overtime? Gym workouts? Thumbing a phone in the locker room? “It’s a slippery slope,” says O’Conner.
That’s one of the arguments that MLB is hoping will resonate with a jury. “[T]here is no typical workday for minor-league baseball players, who are more interested in making the big-league club than with ‘punching in’ at the ballpark at set times or for uniform periods,” the league’s lawyers wrote in a brief seeking Supreme Court consideration.
The Save America’s Pastime Act caused Broshuis to retool his strategy. In a legal brief, he claimed that for former players, his original argument can still retroactively apply from the day that the bill was passed, dating back up to nine years. Although the new legislation makes it harder for current players to win based on federal wage laws, those provisions don’t override state minimum-wage laws, he argued.
Observers of the case, however, say MLB has compelling arguments, too. “Imagine sitting in a jury box hearing minor leaguers complaining,” says Jarvis, “and you’re a construction worker saying, ‘You guys are playing a kid’s game with the chance to be Gerrit Cole and sign for $300 million. You want to see what real working conditions look like, come and live my life.’”
Plenty of professions require calculated risks, Jarvis adds. “As a lawyer, you go to college, then law school, then take the bar exam. Some lawyers will be Johnnie Cochran, and a lot of lawyers will toil in obscurity and be crushed by student debt.”
Ed Edmonds, a University of Notre Dame Law School professor and baseball labor expert, says MLB might cite the Dormant Commerce Clause and argue that state laws influence the entire business of baseball. Asked to predict how MLB would argue its case, Edmonds suggests that it could tie everything back to the Save America’s Pastime Act. “They could say, ‘The United States congressional will was to pass the act and classify these individuals as seasonal apprentices. The democratic process has spoken.’”
2006
Toilet water streams through a crater-sized hole in the ceiling of Broshuis’ apartment in Norwich, Connecticut, soaking the carpet and leaving a stench. Broshuis had been called up to the Double-A Connecticut Defenders. He felt good about his arm but not about his apartment, which cost each roommate $300 per month. The waterfall caused “maggot things growing out of the carpet for two weeks,” Broshuis recalls.
Broshuis grew up in Advance, Missouri (pronounced AD-vance, Broshuis notes: “You have to have that little twang.”), a town of 1,100 that’s two hours south of
St. Louis. His dad was a union tractor-trailer mechanic. His mother, a factory worker and former softball player, taught him to play catch, coached his tee-ball team, and instructed Sunday school at St. Joseph Catholic Church. The family raised livestock on a 10-acre plot, and Broshuis hauled hay for local farmers for 10 cents a bale. At night he drifted off to sleep to the sound of KMOX-AM announcer Jack Buck narrating the exploits of his hero, Ozzie Smith.
In high school, Broshuis had a live arm but no reputation beyond the region. The summer before his senior year, he attended a St. Louis showcase. One of his fastballs hit 91 mph, tied for the event’s best. The next day, 20 college and pro scouts called.
At Mizzou, Broshuis majored in psychology and minored in political science and Spanish. After being drafted, he was dispatched to a short-season rookie team in Salem, Oregon. Starting salary, he says: $850 per month. He made attempts to blend in with guys who weren’t as bookish—“I knew I had to hide my nerdiness,” he admits—but wasn’t always successful. During one bus ride, as he leafed through Great Expectations, a coach asked him who Charles Dickens was. “Garrett definitely stood out as the professor,” recalls former roommate Ryan Sadowski, who’s now a scout for a Korean pro team. “He had a sense of self-realism at a very young age. That was rare. He understood he wasn’t going to be the next Mike Mussina, even though he wanted to be.”
The young pitcher compensated for a lack of overpowering stuff with pinpoint control and workmanlike durability. “He pitched kind of the way he is as a person,” says Sadowski. “Not overwhelmingly aggressive. Solid delivery. He knew where the ball needed to go. He threw a lot of strikes and had great command. He didn’t beat himself.”
He also looked for ways to bridge cultural gaps with teammates. “Brush seemed to be friends with all of the Latin guys,” recalls former teammate Chris Begg, using Broshuis’ nickname. Fluent in Spanish, Broshuis would invite teammates to dinner and host game show nights. Teams were arranged by nationality, and Broshuis would ask trivia questions about the players’ home countries.
There wasn’t a single incident that launched Broshuis’ salary crusade. Rather, his passion evolved mostly through batting practice conversations. “Guys would talk, but nobody wanted to speak out,” he says. “A lot of guys were chasing a dream and scared to upset the status quo.”
There were learning moments, such as when Broshuis learned that the batboy made $50 a game—the same pay Broshuis earned but for a fraction of the time he spent at the park. Or the time he needed to borrow rent money from his new wife, a St. Louis physical therapist who met him while running track at Mizzou. Or the fact that, without money for a TV or furniture, he and his roommates developed a pregame routine of putting together jigsaw puzzles they got from Goodwill. Once completed, the puzzles became wall art.
During offseasons, Broshuis returned to St. Louis, where he’d wake at 6 a.m. to exercise, clock into a Washington University psychology lab where he earned $10 an hour running tests on Alzheimer’s patients, put in a throwing session, and offer private pitching instruction till 10 p.m.
Itching to speak out against pay standards but wary of marking himself as a dissident, he wrote self-deprecating blog posts for The Sporting News. It’s “raining inside our apartment,” he quipped about the toilet overflow. Toward the end of his career, however, his criticism grew more cutting: “My bags are ginormous, but they need to be. My employer will only pay for the checking of two bags.”
By his final year in the minors, the pitcher had become vocal. He’d connected with a Washington state labor lawyer who’d written a book about MLB’s player union. Rather than hang out with other players, Broshuis was content conversing with a retired attorney about employment law. In the locker room, Broshuis preached the gospel of fair pay. “I’m not sure everyone loved him,” says Sadowski. “If you grow up dreaming of professional baseball, you don’t want to admit that this dream you’ve had for your entire life is not what it’s meant to be.”
Broshuis' voice beyond the field grew stronger, but the ability to strike out batters on it did not. At one point, the then-27-year-old visited a San Jose bookstore and walked out with an LSAT study guide. Overnight study sessions on bus rides after his teammates went to sleep became common. Three days after the season ended, Broshuis took the LSAT. Shortly before spring training the following year, he was accepted into SLU’s law school, unaware that his connection to professional baseball was far from over.
2021
After last year’s canceled season, the boys of summer retook the minor league fields in May, exactly 100 years after famed St. Louis Cardinals manager Branch Rickey introduced the modern-day farm system. The cheap hot dogs and corny mascots are back, along with a few MLB-ordered experimental twists, such as larger bases to generate small-ball tactics like bunting and base-stealing, as well as a ban on defensive shifts. To the consternation of baseball purists, one Single-A league even implemented robot umpires.
Those quibbles are low stakes, though, compared to the labor feud looming in the background. Word of Broshuis’ fair-wages battle has trickled down to active players. “Without a union or any real leverage, there is a power imbalance. Garrett is pointing a finger at owners over issues that cost them money, and they don’t like that,” says one High-A player who’s been able to remain in the league thanks to his parents’ financial help.
That power imbalance—and the tipping point that Broshuis’ lawsuit has caused—makes the minors a lens through which to study the sport’s entire labor framework, says University of Notre Dame professor Katherine Walden, who grew up in South County and teaches a course on the history of baseball labor. “Everything ties back to minor league baseball,” she says. ”The draft, player development, the relationship with global professional leagues, restructuring.”
And in terms of restructuring, the minors have seen significant recent changes. Last December, after MLB contracted the league by a quarter, each big-league club selected four franchisee teams to maintain through new licensing agreements. The St. Louis Cardinals, for example, dropped ties with the Johnson City Cardinals in Tennessee and the State College Spikes in Pennsylvania. Both teams joined new amateur showcase leagues run by MLB; the Johnson City Cardinals are now the Johnson City Doughboys.
The contraction, says Broshuis, “was definitely a disappointment. Forty fewer teams means 1,000 fewer minor league players, which means 1,000 fewer guys with a job.” Some suggest that these job losses were a direct result of Broshuis’ case. “One of the unfortunate byproducts of the lawsuit was contraction,” contends law professor Edmonds. Were it not for the lawsuit, Jarvis speculates, MLB might have cut a few teams upon taking control, “but not an overnight, swipe-of-a-pen, 25 percent contraction.” (Broshuis declined to respond to that assertion.)
Could more jobs be on the line? O’Conner worries that if Broshuis wins in court, higher salaries could persuade even deep-pocketed MLB owners to continue to cut players. “They could win the battle and lose the war,” he says, “the war being half the jobs that are there now.”
And yet there is the lingering question of why this is a war that MLB, which takes in more than $10 billion in annual revenue, is choosing to enter at all. By Matheson’s estimate, paying 3,000 minor leaguers minimum wage would amount to an additional $30 million per year—“less than one year of Mike Trout,” he says. “For the price of one superstar, you can make this all go away. You’re talking about three-tenths of MLB revenues for significantly improved working conditions for 80 percent of your athletes.”
Jarvis describes that additional cost as “crumbs” relative to the league’s revenue. The reason that MLB is forging ahead, he suggests, is “an attempt to show dominance, assert control.” Adds Walden, “The majority of the owners are of the posture of ‘This is the hill we will die on.’”
Regardless of the trial’s outcome, the case has already made a mark. As Nathaniel Grow, a professor with Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business school and an expert in sports law, observes, “The lawsuit has had a huge impact in getting the issue of minor league pay, or ‘underpay,’ on the baseball public’s radar.”
