Over the 30 years that he's been employed at almost every level of minor league baseball, Chattanooga Lookouts president Rich Mozingo has seen the extreme sides of his sport, be it the good, the bad, the ugly or too many points in between.
He's seen the bonus bucks babies such as former Los Angeles Dodgers hitting sensation Yasiel Puig get arrested for driving his high-end sports car 97 mph down Amnicola Highway a few months after signing a $42 million contract with the organization.
During an earlier time with a Class A minor league team in Columbia, South Carolina, he watched that city's The State newspaper do a story on 11 of the team's players living in one apartment because that's all they could afford.
"I'm certainly not proud of that," he said on Tuesday. "But that's the way the system worked back then. Those players weren't provided meals, either."
Thankfully, it is different now. The Lookouts' parent club, the Cincinnati Reds, pays for all the players' housing and what amounts to three meals a day during the season.
"They're well-fed," Mozingo said. "There's a hot meal waiting for them when they come to the park each day. There's a sandwich or snack after batting practice, then another hot meal when the game ends. Now if they want an Egg McMuffin on the way to the park, that's on them. But the major league club feeds and houses them during the season and all the minor leaguers who are affiliated with major league clubs got raises this year."
That said, Mozingo admitted he was caught off guard by Tuesday's announcement from the Major League Baseball Players Association that more than 50 percent of minor league players have voted to support unionizing, which would open the door for them to join the MLBPA. Said the union's executive director Tony Clark in a statement: "Minor league players have made it unmistakably clear they want the MLBPA to represent them and are ready to begin collective bargaining in order to positively affect the upcoming season."
Said Mozingo Tuesday evening when asked what all this could mean to minor league outfits such as the Lookouts: "We don't know. This has just popped up. If the system stays as it is, the major leagues will continue to pay all of the players' salaries and provide food and housing. But if you say there's no chance that none of these expenses trickle down to the minor league team, you're fooling yourself. Right now, we just have no idea."
It is, or has been, baseball's dirty little secret for decades. For all the Puigs, Freddie Freemans and Max Scherzers of the sport -- and New York Mets pitcher Scherzer is earning a 2022 MLB-best salary of $43,333,333 as part of a three-year $130 million deal -- there are too many stories of 11 minor leaguers sharing a single apartment.
This is not to say minor league baseball was ever supposed to be a career in the way the majors are. It was, and is, intended to be a stepping stone to the majors and, to some extent, easy street if you're talented enough to remain there. And for those who aren't that talented, a mounting mountain of debt is probably a pretty good sign you need to give up the dream and get a real job like 99.9 percent of the rest of us.
However, with all the money that's apparently out there for major league contracts, with all the demands MLB is placing on minor league clubs such as the Lookouts to improve their facilities or lose their major league affiliations, it does seem as if the parent clubs could provide their prospects with enough money not to look for outside work during the offseason, when they should be improving their skills in an attempt to one day land that big payday.
Instead, according to ESPN, most minor leaguers receive between $400 and $700 a week, and only through the season. Do the math, figuring minor leaguers are paid for eight months -- February through September -- and that means the vast majority of minor leaguers are making between $13,000 and $23,000 a season, hardly the stuff of fast cars and big houses.
MLB did agree in July to pay $185 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit filed by minor league players who claimed they'd been the victims of minimum wage and overtime violations. But if the owners saw that as some sort of hush money to stifle this, they were clearly wrong.
In fact, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to hold hearings on how minor league players are treated and how MLB's antitrust exemption affects them. Baseball's controversial antitrust exemption has been in jeopardy before. The Judiciary Committee, perhaps no longer the lapdog it used to be for major league owners, might go after MLB this time around.
However, what is much more certain to Mozingo is that our elected officials couldn't have picked a better time to embrace a new stadium on the Southside.
"It's premature for us to worry about what could take place down the road," he said. "But it's imperative to build the new stadium. Without those plans, without visible progress, all this talk (of the Lookouts remaining in Chattanooga) would be moot."
Nothing is yet certain on the labor front. Votes have to be taken. Demands have to be floated. Compromises need to be reached. And it's all but guaranteed to fuel bitterness and resentment from all sides -- fans, players and owners alike.
But Mozingo has also been around long enough to see the rainbow after the storm.
"This came out of left field today," he said. "But I also know that where we were 14 years ago is not sustainable. This can make the game better."
Especially for those players who love of the game more than it's often loved them back.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.