I suppose you’re right. It’s just a brutal existence to me. It requires about as much investment in time and incurs as much opportunity cost as training for other skilled professions, but less than a quarter (and even far fewer?) of the people who do so will actually be able to make a living doing it. (Not to mention that those who do make it to the majors, but only for a cup of coffee, are little better off.) And even if you hedge your bets and try to build a fallback career in the offseason, what can you build when you have to be gone six months out of a year?

Whether this system is rational or not, I should say that I doubt major league clubs underpay players in their farm system (if they are indeed the ones who write their checks, see my question below) because they’re trying to give people who don’t have a chance an incentive to quit. I think they underpay them because they can. You have guys making minimum wage — and even less, considering they probably work more than 40 hours a week — and then you have guys for whom anything less than $1 million/year is considered chump change. The former outnumbers the latter like 5 or 6 to 1, and (I think) it’s all coming out of the same pot.

I guess I’m headed toward some type of commie observation. I mean, it isn’t really that surprising that minor leaguers don’t have a players union of their own and don’t complain about their pay to anyone but readers of articles like Broshius’. But, hey, if Moneyball represents a trend toward rationalization of player evaluation in the front office, maybe there will be another rationalization process in which minor leaguers will come to see themselves as workers rather than as simply failed versions of major leaguers. And then there will be CLASS WARFARE.