Pay-to-Play: Selling a Professional Baseball Dream
At its roots, the term professional baseball implies that those playing the game are being paid for their work. It's not a hard concept to get behind, you take the field and are being paid to do so then obviously you are a professional. This rigid definition works perfectly fine in the higher levels of the professional game. No one is about to argue that those who ply their trade in Major League Baseball, Nippon Professional Baseball, or Liga Mexicana del Pacífico aren't professionals.
The definition wobbles a bit more the farther down the professional ladder one goes. How exactly do we reconcile the idea of leagues being professional or semi-professional when the majority of players in a league are being paid, but not everyone is?
There are a lot of places for this discussion to go. I'll let one cat out of the bag before we go any further, I'm not sure the term semi-professional should be applied to baseball leagues in the present day and age. If everything about your presentation is professional and you are paying the majority of your players then it feels like the semi-pro label is nothing more than a swipe at the players to make them feel lesser than they actually are.
However, that's a different argument for a different article. What is on the menu today is the idea of pay-to-play and how that has permeated the lower levels of professional baseball throughout North America, America specifically.
One of my pet projects is that I maintain aStreaming Guidefor unaffiliated baseball. I strive to include every unaffiliated professional league that I know of in the Guide. Sometimes it's easy to find leagues, other times I have to dig and do a bit of research. During one of my recent research runs I was surprised at the sheer number of leagues that have popped up in the past few seasons that are professional, or at the bare minimum claim to be semi-professional, but exist in the realm of pay-to-play.
To be clear, I've known for some time that pay-to-play is a thing within professional baseball. The practice seemed to be limited to one noteworthy league and a few fly by night and then gone leagues and thus it was easier to forget that such a practice was in regular usage.
Pay-to-play is exactly as it sounds; players looking to continue, or begin, their dreams of playing professional baseball pay leagues to allow them to play. The biggest of these leagues is the Pecos League, or PECO as it is often known. This is not the same as what most independent, or unaffiliated, leagues engage in where players pay to try out for a chance to catch on with the league. Indie leagues from the Pacific Association to the Atlantic League use the tryout system.
That system does feel somewhat dubious, but it doesn't carry with it the requirement that players pay to play in the league they tried out for. If a player is chosen from one of those tryouts then they start receiving whatever the regular pay rate is for that league as it would be applied to that specific player.
PECO is different in that while players can pay to go the tryout route they can also simply pay to play in the league if they are not signed via the tryout. The amount they play is constantly changing, but it's typically around $2,200 per player. The players are then paid for their time in the league. That dollar amount also changes frequently but typically comes in at $50 a week for the duration of the season. The PECO season is usually ten weeks long.
Simple back of the napkin math means that players who paid $2,200 to play in the league will receive a salary of $500 for the entire season. The pay-to-play method is set up this way to ensure that all those involved with PECO at a higher level (especially the league's owner, Andrew Dunn) make a profit while the players take a loss.
The players know they will take this loss, they have accepted that this is the price they have to pay in order to try and catch on with a professional baseball league. They all do this because they believe that they can be one of the rare success stories who use their time in PECO to advance up the independent league ladder and maybe, just maybe, find themselves in affiliated baseball at some point.
Dunn and everyone involved with PECO, know that they are selling a nearly impossible dream. It is very much a situation where the players are being manipulated and taken advantage of, but they accept this reality because of their desire to play professional baseball.
just to really hammer the point home here, in case you are unfamiliar: the Pecos League is -- with all due respect to those who continue to compete in it -- the absolute bottom of independent league baseball. anyone making it to the big leagues after playing there is WILD-- Céspedes Family BBQ (@CespedesBBQ)February 24, 2020
just to really hammer the point home here, in case you are unfamiliar: the Pecos League is -- with all due respect to those who continue to compete in it -- the absolute bottom of independent league baseball. anyone making it to the big leagues after playing there is WILD
In the course of my recent research, I came across a number of pay-to-play leagues that have popped up recently. Various leagues like the Texas State Baseball League and American Torque Winter League have surfaced and are engaging in the same pay-to-play activities as PECO long has. This cycle seems to repeat itself every few years where a number of new pay-to-play leagues surface, fleece players, then go out of business rather quickly.
PECO itself has formed the Western League and Spring League. The Western League is presented as a professional league, while the Spring League is a showcase only (which is shorthand for not professional but wants people to view them as professional). The one thing both leagues have in common outside of being owned and operated by Dunn? You guessed it, they are both pay-to-play.
The question becomes, what do we make of these leagues? It's easy to dismiss them and say that they shouldn't be given the time of day. They may be professional leagues, but it's clear in their business practices that they are more scam and scheme than anything else. To ignore them or to label them as fraudulent would make a lot of sense and not be completely dishonest. What does that mean for the players participating in those leagues?
It means that in addition to forking over their money to pursue a professional baseball career they would be ignored and get absolutely no reward for the act of playing professional ball. Perhaps some would weigh the choice of not giving these leagues attention against the players getting nothing out of the process and say, "Well, they made their choice and it's better that they suffer more than these leagues get any attention."
That's not an approach I would say is wrong, but it's not one that I agree with. These players are still professional ballplayers, they deserve to be accorded the same respect as pro ballplayers in other leagues not engaging in pay-to-play shenanigans. They are the ones caught in the scheme, not the perpetrators of the scheme and it simply does not feel right to me to punish them for a league/s that sees fit to take advantage of them.
There isn't an easy answer when it comes to how to handle any of these pay-to-play leagues. Their business practices are abhorrent and for that reason alone it's hard to see why anyone would want them to succeed. It is true that they bring professional baseball to communities that need that sort of business. That fact does not mean that they should be able to run their business in such a way that their main employees suffer. There's also the quandary of whether, beyond PECO at least, these leagues are actually doing anything to improve the communities they are a part of?
The players themselves deserve more than they are getting and do not deserve to be shunned for the actions undertaken by their bosses. I continue to write about these leagues and players specifically because I believe the players don't deserve to be ignored. The pay-to-play problem is a complicated one, but one thing I do know is that while the players need protection and deserve attention, they won't actually get any until pay-to-play has been eradicated from the baseball landscape.