Had the coronavirus pandemic not swallowed the globe as it has, the Minnesota Twins would’ve been 51 games into the season as the defending champions of the American League Central Division.
Instead, the Twins and Major League Baseball sit idle awaiting the possibility of playing a shortened season. But despite huge revenue losses attributed to missed games, the Twins are committed to paying employees and avoiding layoffs, according to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.
“Good news for #MNTwins employees, according to a source: Team is committed to paying full salaries and benefits through June 30. No furloughs, not even for interns,” Rosenthal tweeted.
ESPN’s Jeff Passan seconded the report, calling the Twins a “model organization” for “how they treat their employees.”
As teams around baseball weigh pay cuts, the Minnesota Twins and St. Louis Cardinals have proven themselves model organizations in how they treat their employees. Both have committed to keeping their full staffs on at full pay through at least the end of June, sources tell ESPN.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) May 21, 2020
“There have been a lot of dark moments for team employees this week, especially with the Los Angeles Angels organization furloughing a significant portion of their baseball-ops staff. How the Twins and Cardinals acted, as @Ken_Rosenthal reported, illustrates teams can do right,” Passan added.
However, the full pay doesn’t funnel down to the minor leagues. While the minimum salary for players on the 40-man MLB roster is $563,500, players fighting for future big-league careers in the minors are being paid $400 a week.
Twins prospect Mitch Horacek, a 6-foot-5 left-handed pitcher who spent the 2019 season at Double-A with the Colorado Rockies, doesn’t qualify for the full pay from the Twins.
“I’m a Twins employee being paid 13% of my salary to be 100% ready to play baseball at a moment’s notice. I’m also locked out of MLB/MLBPA negotiations because MLBPA doesn’t represent minor leaguers,” Horacek tweeted.
He later added that minor leaguers are “treated like second class citizens.”
The point is that MiLB players are treated like second class citizens.
Twins staff gets full salary.
Twins 40 man gets negotiated cut of agreed salary
Twins MiLB get what owners feel is enough to ward off bad public opinion, nothing more.
— Mitch Horacek (@mhoracek14) May 22, 2020
According to the Los Angeles Times, the MLB Players Association has helped supplement players not on the 40-man MLB roster by giving any minor leaguer who has at least one day of MLB service a weekly stipend of $5,000.
Unfortunately, Horacek falls into the large pool of minor leaguers who haven’t received a promotion to the big leagues, so he and others again fall short of the supplemental MLBPA money.
