In his day job, Fletcher helps different nonprofit, labor and community organizations grow. He was previously the president of the TransAfrica Forum, and well before that, a Mets fan. But by his own admission, he was worse than mediocre as a Little League player, and eventually he stopped paying baseball much attention.

 

An AFL-CIO meeting in Milwaukee in 2000 rekindled his interest. Once a senior staffer at that powerhouse collection of unions, Fletcher picked up an airline magazine, which carried a piece about Curt Flood. Fletcher had forgotten about Flood’s seminal fight against the reserve clause, the language that restricted players from signing with a different team.

 

“That’s when I fell back in love with baseball,” Fletcher said, “And it was basically for social reasons, social justice.”

 

Many years later, in 2016, Fletcher’s wife, Candice Cason, read a Washington Post story about the plight of minor league baseball players under the headline, “Baseball’s minor leaguers pursue their dreams below the poverty line.”

 

Among those featured in the piece was a player in the San Francisco Giants’ system, Matt Paré, who had put together a YouTube series on minor league life, called “Homeless Minor Leaguer.” Paré was sleeping in the dining room to cut costs for him and his teammates, and had accumulated a pile of credit card debt. Cason passed the story on to her husband.

 

“Bill,” she said, “these folks need a union.”

 

When he read the story himself, Fletcher felt the conditions minor leaguers faced were serious. That, in fact, players were living a life reminiscent of agricultural workers.

 

“The incredible poor level of pay, the precariousness of their existence, that there was no housing,” said Fletcher. “Not necessarily having enough money to pay for food.”

 

Another San Francisco Giants minor leaguer, Garrett Broshuis, was quoted in the story as well. Broshuis was done playing and had become a lawyer. A couple years earlier, he had filed a groundbreaking lawsuit on behalf of minor leaguers, alleging that MLB and its teams had violated state and federal wage laws.

 

The credit for the new minor league baseball players’ union lies with thousands of players. But leaders were needed too, and beyond Fletcher stood three ex-players.

 

The Major League Baseball Players Association and its executive director, Tony Clark, welcomed the minor leaguers into the big league union, providing guidance and funding beforehand. Harry Marino, a player turned lawyer who became executive director at the non-profit Advocates for Minor Leaguers, led a complex orchestration that melded player outreach with political and public pressure. And Broshuis, also a player turned lawyer, co-founded that non-profit, which led the organizing work no group had taken on before.

 

Broshuis considers himself “an unlikely advocate.”

 

From a small town in southern Missouri, he didn’t know many attorneys, much less labor attorneys. Neither of his parents went to college. His father, a mechanic and driver who worked on 18 wheelers and Caterpillar machinery, had been in different unions, but nothing about Broshuis’ upbringing suggested he would wind up spearheading a labor movement.

 

A standout in school and as a pitcher, Broshuis was drafted by the Giants in 2004, and began writing about his experience as a player for The Sporting News. At the time, it was rare for the media, never mind players or anyone else directly involved with the minors, to talk about salaries, or the difficulty players had finding housing. The minors were treated as a proving grounds, a sacrifice intrinsic to the sport.

 

What Broshuis did carry from a young age, instilled by his parents, was a sense of fairness, and a willingness to stick up for those who were treated poorly. Playing in the minors, he quickly realized “things weren’t being done the right way.”

 

 

“Dissidents often use humor initially, because you can get by with humor more often,” he said. “I won’t say that I sugarcoated what I was writing about, but I definitely wasn’t as expressive as I could have been. That’s partly because the Giants made me email in every story before I sent it to the Sporting News for approval the first year. But over time, I became a little more outspoken.”

 

As an undergraduate, Broshuis studied psychology, and knew he wanted to pursue some sort of graduate program. He knew was unlikely to make the big leagues. But he realized he didn’t want to spend his time in a lab, and sought more of an immediate impact.

 

Broshuis can’t recall who passed on the late Don Wollett’s book to him, but Broshuis got his hands on it in 2009, his last year as a player. A longtime lawyer, Wollett published a relatively short work, “Getting on Base: Unionism in Baseball,” that made the case for minor league unionization.

The germ to go to law school grew. The idea of starting a union did, too.

 

“Before reading that book, it just always seemed like some fantasy to do something like that,” Broshuis said. “I started talking with teammates, talking with anybody who would listen, really. … It just didn’t go anywhere at all. I just don’t think players were quite ready then, and I wasn’t the right person then, either.”

 

Although Broshuis was a team leader as a player, he wasn’t yet the type yet to rock the boat.

“Agitation itself is not something that comes naturally to me,” he said. “People would act like I was wanting to talk about spreading the plague or something. There were definitely people who thought it was just absolutely crazy to be thinking about these ideas.”

 

In the clubhouse, on bus rides and during batting practice, Broshuis talked to teammates about wages, about how something needed to be done. He found sympathetic ears. But when the chats turned to action, no one wanted to be the first to step across the line.

 

When they connected in 2016, Broshuis and Fletcher immediately started brainstorming possibilities, and liked the idea of organizing a formal union. But the path would be steep.

 

“You’re talking about thousands of players spread out all over the country,” Broshuis said. “There is a tremendous fear players have of angering their employer. And there’s also a relatively high turnover rate in the industry. So all those things presented obstacles to organizing.”

 

Fletcher saw three options: The union representing big leaguers, the Major League Baseball Players Association, could organize the minor leaguers; a different union could do it; or the minor leaguers could create an independent union.

 

The third option was considered the least desirable, because it’s usually better to draw on the experience and resources of an established group. The MLBPA was considered the ideal choice, with not only deep pockets, but specific industry knowledge. But the duo knew convincing the Players Association would be tough. The powerful union had chosen not to represent minor leaguers for half a century, for many of the same reasons that Broshuis and Fletcher now would have to contend with.

“The notion that these very young, inexperienced people were going to defy the owners, when they had stars in their eyes about making it to the major leagues — it’s just not going to happen,” Marvin Miller, the famed founding executive director of the MLBPA, told Slate in 2012.

 

A friend of Fletcher’s had an idea: “Bill, remember the steelworkers?”

 

United Steelworkers, or the USW for short, was already woven into baseball’s labor history, for Miller had been one of the steelworker’s leading voices. But they were raised to Fletcher now because of more recent history. In 2014, with support from the USW, college football players at Northwestern made a bid to unionize.

 

“We felt that we had an obligation as organized labor to improve the lives of workers, and in that sense, we view these college athletes as workers,” said Fred Redmond, now secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, then a higher-up with the USW.

 

The effort ultimately did not come to fruition, but Fletcher, entrenched in the labor scene, had connections to Redmond and the USW, which already represented workers in industries other than steel.

 

“Most of the time, people read an article, and it might move them emotionally, but they don’t really do anything about it,” Broshuis said. “And there’s a small subset of people that might actually reach out to somebody asking how they can help. And there’s an even tinier subset of people that can reach out and actually have the ability to really do something about it. That’s what made Bill unique.”

By no later than 2017, talks with the steelworkers had begun. Fletcher sensed that the steelworkers’ union was genuinely excited about the possibility of working with minor leaguers, but momentum stalled.

 

“At some point, the (USW) organizing director set up a meeting with the MLBPA, and Garrett and I were not included in the meeting,” Fletcher said. “The outcome of the meeting was effectively that the organizing director concluded that nothing would succeed without the MLBPA. And the MLBPA gave a sort of pro forma response on the issue of organizing, basically saying that, in principle, they supported the unionization of minor leaguers. But they themselves weren’t going to do anything until and unless the minor leaguers took the first move.”

 

The meeting included Clark, then-MLBPA general counsel David Prouty, and steelworkers general counsel Rich Brean, the latter said.

 

“They were welcoming of the opportunity to have somebody organize, but they weren’t ready at the time to do it,” Brean said of the MLBPA’s message. “Everybody was sympathetic. … They just were not ready to step in.”

 

Redmond recalled that there was hesitancy on the part of the MLBPA in part because the MLBPA was preparing for collective bargaining over the major league contract.

 

“It would be very difficult for them to do and to get the support of their players,” Redmond said.

Clark said the meeting with the USW was one of several the MLBPA had in the last decade with outside unions interested in organizing minor leaguers. Questions would be raised, like whether it made sense to organize one level of the minors, say Triple A, or to organize the whole group. None of the projects got far off the ground, though.

 

“We offered advice and insight,” Clark said. “Now, the idea that none of this happens unless the MLBPA is involved, that wasn’t said explicitly. What was represented was that, to the extent we could support the efforts, we would.”

 

Broshuis and Fletcher moved on from the steelworkers, reaching out to the Transport Workers Union, as well as Jobs With Justice, an alliance of unions and community groups. Jobs With Justice started reaching out to players, but didn’t have the resources for a full organizing campaign.

 

“They wanted to test the waters, because then they might be able to make a case with some of the unions (they worked with),” Fletcher said.

 

More and more, it didn’t seem like any outside union would take up the cause.

 

“There were a lot of sympathetic groups,” Broshuis said. “But everybody kept coming back to the same conclusion: That if you really want something like this to happen, then the MLBPA has to be involved.”

 

For a time, Fletcher and Broshuis were collaborating with another group interested to help minor leaguers, but they were keen to take a less adversarial approach. The pair doubted such a tack could be effective.

 

“They wanted to basically reach out to MLB, and develop a partnership with MLB, to do things like buying equipment for players,” Fletcher said. “Get food, housing, stuff like that. And Garrett and I said, ‘Look, that’s all well and good, but MLB is not interested in collaborating. That’s a dead end.’ But we couldn’t convince (them). And in fact, our relationship became very complicated.”

 

There wasn’t a moment in the process where Fletcher felt he was ready to give up. But there were some when he was second guessing. A member of that other group told Fletcher “that the players were afraid of Garrett and me,” Fletcher said.

 

“I was pissed, I have to tell you,” Fletcher said.

 

Not at the players who may have felt that way, but with the other group’s passiveness.

 

“Because I felt like, ‘Do you have any idea what’s involved in organizing?’” he continued. “In almost every non-union situation, when you’re organizing, there is some level of fear that workers have about retaliation. There’s nothing new about that, and there’s nothing unique when you’re organizing minor league players, when it comes to that. There’s going to be fear and you take that for granted. You build in a response to that. You build to overcome that. You don’t let that freeze you. And the idea that, you know, we should be playing patty cake with MLB because the players are allegedly afraid — bosta.”

 

Broshuis and Fletcher had support elsewhere, though. In 2019, as Broshuis talked to players like Matt Paré, and Ty Kelly and Raul Jacobson, as well as a content strategist who runs a creative branding agency, Lisa Raphael, a feeling was building that players were ready, at the least, for a forum to collaborate.

 

“There just wasn’t anything out there like that for them,” Broshuis said. “There wasn’t a way for them to get their stories told in an anonymous manner where they could be protected. There wasn’t a way for ball players to even communicate, really, with each other about the issues that they’re facing.”

Even without another union’s support, there was an avenue to start organizing, as Broshuis put it, “with a little ‘o.’”

 

Tony Clark discussing the minor league unionization process at a press conference in September (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

 

Two major events precipitated the formal creation of Advocates for Minor Leaguers as a non-profit in 2020. The first, Broshuis said, was “a slap in the face to every ball player out there.”

On a Sunday night in 2018, Broshuis got a call from a political reporter. A bill in Congress, the Save America’s Pastime Act, had just been tacked on to an omnibus spending package, the reporter told him. Broshuis was aware of the SAP act, which had been introduced to congress two years earlier, with the support of the commissioner’s office.

 

Despite its name, the bill was hardly intended to benefit players: the Save America’s Pastime Act would exempt them from federal minimum wage and overtime laws. The Act was modifying the same federal law cited in the lawsuit Broshuis and his firm, Korein Tillery, filed against Major League Baseball in 2014. That case is referred to as “Senne” for short, after the last name of one of the plaintiffs who sued MLB.

 

“It’s added by leadership onto this omnibus spending bill, it has to pass three days later so the government remains functioning. What are you gonna do about it at that point?” Broshuis said. “That became a galvanizing moment, because it was so dehumanizing, and it was just such a blow — it was such an affront to the dignity of every ballplayer out there, to think that MLB thinks that they shouldn’t even be entitled to the minimum wage.”

 

The public was newly paying attention to the minor leagues for another reason in this period. In 2019, Matt Paré joined Broshuis for a trip to Iowa, where Sen. Bernie Sanders was speaking out against a plan MLB had developed to contract 40 minor league teams, a plan that MLB executed the next year.

Broshuis, Fletcher and the players involved were already planning Advocates’ launch for 2020. But within that year, the timetable moved up because of the other major precipitating event, a devastating one, COVID-19. Minor league players, like so many, were mired in uncertainty: Would there be a season? Would they be paid? What about training arrangements?

 

“There was no more waiting around,” Broshuis said.

 

Paré had video experience, and Ty Kelly was a good writer. Advocates for Minor Leaguers honed its messaging around the high level of comfort athletes had making personal sacrifices for achievement.

“It’s not necessarily in the nature of an athlete to go out and say, I deserve better conditions,” Paré said. “Because well, then you’re not tough.

 

“But you don’t have to put up with that in the workplace,” Paré continued. “That was something that I had to learn, even after I was done playing. And the group of people who founded Advocates didn’t want that to have to be the same for the next generation.”

 

They wanted to change the public discourse. During the pandemic, the group created a scoreboard tracking which teams were paying players.

 

“You could see the teams that didn’t, so everyone could see their rival teams,” Paré said. “This team’s paying a stipend and our team’s not? Come on, do better.”

 

Now, Advocates was not a labor union. As a non-profit, the group could bring players together and build support and work on their behalf, but could not become the collective bargaining representative of the players. Even in the lane it occupied, though, Advocates couldn’t fully spread its wings.

“We wouldn’t make sufficient breakthroughs until we’re able to at least bring on a couple of staff,” Fletcher said. “Well, we had no money.”

 

Everyone involved was working as a volunteer, and the only funding they had at the start had come from individual donors, less than $100,000 total, per Broshuis. They needed more.

 

Fletcher was nervous. He had a connection at the Ford Foundation, a major charity with a mission to reduce poverty and injustice. The foundation had recently elevated its focus on worker groups “as a critical component of ensuring that workers have the right wages, the right protection and the right safety nets,” said José García, director of the Ford Foundation’s Future Workers team.

 

Still, Fletcher knew at the end of the day, he was making a request to assist athletes.

 

“I was afraid, to be very honest, that they were going to say, you know, cute idea, come back to us with something more important,” Fletcher said.

 

García grew up in Puerto Rico. He knew stories of players who didn’t make it, who didn’t receive the glamorous treatment that a lot of people associate with professional sports. Baseball players, to that point, hadn’t been at the top of his mind, but he quickly saw their livelihoods in a labor context.

“We believe that all workers, regardless of their status, have equal rights to labor and protection,” García said. “And that social protection should be guaranteed for all, and that all workers should shape the policy and the economic system that affects their lives. When we met minor league baseball, we saw salaries … making minor league players among the most poorly compensated workers.

 

“And around 40 percent of those are Latino. Many players come from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela with big dreams, and this is what they encounter. Many players never finish high school. When they work, they’re underpaid, undervalued, poorly treated and are unable to use their voice to change their working condition, individually and collectively, when they’ve left their home country.”

The Ford Foundation was on board. They would provide a $200,000 grant in 2021, and another in 2022, García said.

 

“When they told us that the money was coming through, I nearly fell over,” Fletcher said. “Because, frankly, I’ve had nice discussions with funders before that resulted in nothing but a pat on the head and telling me to come back next year.”

 

It wasn’t the only new funding coming Advocates’ way.

 

All along, Advocates’ leadership hoped the MLBPA would get involved. Broshuis and Clark had been in touch here and there, but the pandemic provided a new spark. The major league season was shortened, while the minor leagues had no season at all. Big leaguers, as well as union leadership, were increasingly concerned about the lot of the minor leaguers.

 

“Going back probably a good three or four years already, maybe even longer than that, major league players were asking about the minor leaguers, Are there things we can do to provide support? What does that support look like?” Clark said. “Those interests picked up, particularly in 2020.”

 

That summer, the MLBPA’s charitable arm, the Major League Baseball Players Trust, committed $1 million to support minor leaguers. A significant amount of the money went to Advocates in 2020 and 2021, Clark said. Clark and Broshuis declined to provide the specific allotments.

 

“With that, we were able to bring on Harry Marino,” Fletcher said. “And it was one of the best things that we could have done.”

 

Charismatic and driven, Harry Marino was a rising star in the legal world in 2020, but faced a conundrum. An ex-Baltimore Orioles minor league pitcher, he wanted to do volunteer work for Advocates on the side. But he couldn’t do so while remaining at his firm, Williams & Connolly, where he worked mostly on Supreme Court and appellate litigation.

 

The son of a lawyer, Marino always remembered the five air mattresses he saw on the ground in a one-bedroom apartment where his teammates lived. He thought it absurd how they had to step over each other just to get to the bathroom. So Marino decided to leave his firm and his handsome salary. He landed at a practice that included baseball agents, allowing him hands-on work with the industry and the ability to help Advocates on the side.

 

Come 2021, with Advocates’ new money from the Ford Foundation and MLBPA on hand, Broshuis and co. needed an executive director. Marino was the perfect candidate.

 

“As a former ballplayer himself, he was intimately familiar with the issues,” Broshuis said. “He’s not just an attorney, but an attorney who had clerked for federal judges and was working at a big law firm. He’s as smart as anybody. And he communicates really well, too.”

 

Advocates was entering its second phase, one with an even more aggressive approach. For as similar as Marino and Broshuis were — both pitchers turned lawyers — Marino was perhaps even more eager to go on the offensive. He had a plan at the outset, and it was ambitious.

 

“It’s like anything else, you’re going to build it brick by brick from starting at kind of a blank slate,” Marino said, “and then you build it out over time, and scale it over time.”

 

With help from another hire, communications veteran Kevin Slack, Marino would have Advocates act even more boldly online. Many efforts were geared toward a particular issue: housing.

 

“Our social media accounts were incredible, and particularly the Twitter account was really instrumental,” Marino said. “As well as the courage of players to engage with reporters and to speak, whether anonymously or by name, about the working conditions in a really systematic and consistent way over a period of weeks and months.”

 

By the end of the 2021 season, MLB had promised that for 2022, they would provide living accommodations for minor leaguers. Even if imperfect, it was a huge victory for Advocates, displaying the power players could tap into.

 

The year would see another change. Broshuis stepped back from Advocates, focusing on the Senne lawsuit.

 

“Because I had my full time job as an attorney,” Broshuis said. “And at that point, we’re around a year away from trial and a lawsuit. And my time was best served towards making sure that lawsuit was successful as well.”

 

But it might not have been quite that simple. MLB sent inquiries suggesting “there was something inappropriate in what we were doing (at Advocates), and the relationship that it had with the class action,” Fletcher said. People briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly, said those inquiries were subpoenas.

 

Broshuis and the commissioner’s office declined to comment on the subpoenas. Fletcher said there was no fine line that Advocates was walking as it related to the Senne case.

 

“There was no relationship with the class action,” he said. “In fact, there was a point when, early on, I asked Garrett … Can we reach out to the class about what we’re doing?’ And he said, no. He said he would not feel comfortable doing something like that. And he was very clear … that these things had to be kept separate.”

 

Broshuis said that legally, he didn’t think he had to remove himself from Advocates.

 

“But it was a natural separation where we had a staff in place,” he said. “Let the staff fulfill the mission of Advocates. And then I stepped aside, put in all of my time and effort in ensuring that the lawsuit was successful.”

 

Asked if he felt MLB ever tried to intimidate him, Broshuis demurred.

 

“That’s a tough question,” Broshuis said. “The league itself? I don’t think I’m comfortable answering that, I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll write a book someday.”

 

Garrett Broshuis in 2016 in St. Louis, early in the class-action lawsuit he brought against Major League Baseball. (Whitney Curtis / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

 

Advocates’ third phase, the systematic organizing of players, began toward the end of 2021, last offseason. Over the next year, Marino would talk and message with thousands of players about unionizing. Others at the organization, like former major league catcher Josh Thole, conducted outreach as well.

 

“It took a tremendous amount of work to have the player conversations, initially via social media, and then via phone calls, Zoom calls etc.,” Marino said. “But as time consuming as it was, it was always incredibly rewarding… you develop bonds.”

 

When Marino arrived at Advocates, he spoke of doing everything he could to help players. “Pressure” would be an operative word, and it would come from myriad places: Not just social or traditional media, but state and federal politicians. He would try to create a perfect storm.

 

As the organizing drive got underway, the Senne case, Broshuis’ lawsuit, was coming to a head, with a trial date set for June 1. MLB had new incentive to avoid a trial after a federal judge largely ruled in favor of the players during summary judgment.

 

A tentative settlement for $185 million was reached in the summer, and it included a promise that MLB would handle minor leaguers’ contracts differently in the future. Eight years after Broshuis filed it, Senne was a gigantic win for the players.

 

“This was a very complicated lawsuit. They call it complex litigation for a reason,” Broshuis said. “A number of procedural hurdles, an appeal to a federal court of appeals and petition to the US Supreme Court. You had dozens of parties involved, leading to over 100 depositions that took place, and scores of discovery disputes along the way.”

 

Marino and Advocates got the attention of some powerful U.S. Senators, too, members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee who during the summer started to publicly question MLB’s antitrust exemption. Marino and Advocates argued the exemption was negatively affecting minor leaguers’ working conditions. MLB did not agree, but the senators threatened to hold a hearing on Capitol Hill about the matter.

 

While some luck may have been involved, the timing of these elements was purposeful.

 

“Obviously the lawsuit, that was happening outside of Advocates,” Marino said. “Then the media pressure, political pressure and then ultimately, the player pressure, all of those things happening simultaneously were central to trying to accomplish the goal. They ultimately were heating up all at the same time, which is part of why players understood this was the right time to make this move.”

There was one domino that had yet to fall: Was the MLBPA ready, now, in late summer 2022, to take in the minor leaguers?

 

“A few things became clear,” Bill Fletcher Jr. said. “One was that Tony, who is a very smart, very sharp guy, was also very much in support of the unionization of minor leaguers. But he’s very cautious. And he wanted to make sure that there was going to be sufficient support within the MLBPA to such an effort. So things moved slowly, and they moved slower than we had hoped.

 

“Because we were starting to build up a head of steam. We got the victory around the housing, we had players, minor and major, that were wearing things, the wristbands etc., expressing their support for the issues that we were raising. We needed the MLBPA to step forward and do something.”

 

Steadily, but far out of the public eye, Clark and the MLBPA, including one of the union’s top lawyers, Ian Penny, had grown more involved with Advocates. The MLBPA committed additional money to the group for 2022 beyond the initial donation, and Clark in 2021 started having regular calls with Marino.

“That (financial) commitment in 2020 lent itself to periodic calls, which then lent itself to bi-weekly calls, and then lent itself to weekly calls, all of which really transpired over the last nearly two years,” Clark said.

 

Then this spring, during the major league lockout, Clark and others at the union met with some minor leaguers in person, in Arizona and Florida. Clark wanted to make clear that the MLBPA was not only listening, but actively interested in the effort.

 

“There was an opportunity to have face-to-face conversations with Harry and some of the Advocates staff, as well as some of the player leaders, if you will, on the minor league side,” Clark said.

 

Still, Advocates and the MLBPA both had “differences and agreements on issues of strategy,” Fletcher said. “There was a certain level of tension, that I think it’d be fair to say that existed.”

 

The MLBPA’s involvement was kept out of the public view and purposely so, to minimize the potential for interference. Most player agents and many others in the industry were unaware what was coming.

Come August, the question was whether this was the moment to make a bold move: to push for certification, and collect union authorization cards signed by players.

 

To do so, Fletcher felt, was “very risky.” The requirement to form a union is support from a majority of those who return cards. But often, union efforts don’t go public unless they have a sense of support from 75 or 80 percent of the potential bargaining unit. Fletcher said support hadn’t been counted at that level.

 

“The reason you don’t (move before then) is that you have to anticipate a worst-case scenario,” Fletcher said. “You always build a strategy around what could go wrong.”

 

The fear was that an anti-union campaign, if MLB elected to pursue one, could erode support and potentially jeopardize success. Marino, though, was highly confident they’d be successful because of the player sentiment he had encountered.

 

“Plenty of people… had doubts as to how players would come through when the moment came,” he said. “I did not.”

 

Still, going public without requisite support and ultimately not forming a union would be a major setback.

 

“There are threshold numbers that we needed to have in order for the process to move forward,” Clark said. “The timing was such that a week later, players were going to be leaving and wrapping up their seasons. The minor league players who were at the complexes, the spring training complexes, had already left. And so with the contact information that we had, with the short timeframe that we had with the season winding down, the question became whether that was the time to take the shot.”

It was indeed, as Clark put it, time to “hit the go button.”

 

The MLBPA in August decided to publicly launch a union drive, sending players authorization cards, and pushing MLB to a decision. The league could voluntarily recognize the union after a card count, or force an election through the National Labor Relations Board, which would take more time. MLB chose the path of less resistance.

 

The commissioner’s office declined to comment for this story. In a statement last month, the league said: “Major League Baseball has a long history of bargaining in good faith with unions, including those representing minor and major league umpires, and major league players. We respect the right of workers to decide for themselves whether to unionize.”

 

The specter of a potential senate hearing on the league’s antitrust exemption likely made MLB less interested in a fight — a specter Advocates pushed for with the help of the MLBPA’s general funding.

More broadly, Clark has repeatedly attributed the MLBPA’s decision to take in the minor leaguers to “the right group of players at the right time in the right climate.”

 

“I say that on the minor league side, and I say that on the major league side,” Clark said.

 

Clark’s reference to “climate” likely is a nod to politics. President Joe Biden is an ardent supporter of unions, and that’s reflected in the National Labor Relations Board. David Prouty, the former MLBPA general counsel, was appointed by Biden as an NLRB board member.

 

Clark in August joined Zoom calls with minor leaguers for the first time, a morale boost. “All of a sudden Tony was on there, it was like, ‘Oh, shit, this is getting real,’” said Joe Hudson, a catcher in the Rays system and one of the player leaders.

 

“Harry believed that my involvement could be beneficial in their player communications,” Clark said.

When players received their union authorization cards, sent online late at night Aug. 28, it had the MLBPA logo on them. No union’s name resonates more with baseball players than that one. Seventeen days later, minor leaguers were officially in the fold.

 

“We moved obviously very quickly to take it from, this is something that can and is going to be done, to completed, in sort of a breakneck fashion,” Marino said. “Which is to say that there was a tremendous amount of groundwork and planning and vision about where this could go. … But from the moment of the actual decision on the part of all the relevant players that this was something they wanted to do now, to actually doing it and executing, that piece of it was extremely fast.”

 

Baseball, like most industries, has prized disruption. What did “Moneyball” amount to, if not that? The unionization of the minor leaguers is another form, but it runs in a different direction.

 

Directly or not, “Moneyball” and its derivative movements produced better value for team owners. Some players certainly did make gains as the sport barreled into its portfolio management mindset, the players-as-commodities outlook that’s become a hallmark of the sport this century. But here, the players are the primary beneficiaries, almost exclusively.

 

“When the MLBPA finally made the announcement, after all this time, to see them finally take that step, and recognize the worth and the value of these players, and that they merited inclusion into this select organization, it was just a really surreal moment, that did warrant just taking a seat for a few moments and just smiling and appreciating the gravity,” Broshuis said.

 

“The driver,” Clark said, “was putting the players in the best position possible to have a successful campaign.”