Blanks playing for the San Diego Padres in 2013.
Kyle Blanks was drafted by the San Diego Padres in the 42nd round of the 2004 MLB Draft form Moriarty High School (Moriarty, NM). Blanks played 13 professional seasons, spending parts of 11 of them in the Minor Leagues. Being a later round draft pick and coming straight from high school and a quick stop of junior college to professional baseball, Blanks defied the odds to make the Major Leagues. Blanks has been a tremendous help to us in terms of understand how the MiLB system works and how most people look at professional baseball players and believe that every one of them makes millions of dollars, when that is far from true. Below are some notes that we took during our conversation with Kyle, paraphrased into sentences.
"The assumption is all players are wealthy. The majority of players received little or no signing bonus. $330 was my first paycheck at the professional level. The signing bonus is meant to get you through the grind and keep you financially stable throughout the Minors, but a lot of guys cannot live off of their salary, even with the bonus.
I really enjoy talking about this topic. It opens up the spectrum. Not everyone knows MiLB players are often poor it needs to be known.
Playing in the Minors in 2005 and also later in my career, I can see that changes are being made.
On paper, playing a game for a livelihood sounds amazing. However, we had terrible working conditions.
Playing alongside guys with families, I could see that the wages started to impact some guys. Some guys stopped playing because of the wage.
The system is set up by people who don’t play the game, there’s a disconnect there.
150 guys in MiLB, if you find a fair wage you want to pay them like $3,000 a month, it is only a couple million.
With my signing bonus, I never worried about bills, I even helped some guys pay theirs.
Frame up the objective reality. This is a job. You get paid a little over $1,000 a month, you get $25 per day for food, health insurance is covered, you travel all over waking up early to catch buses to flights. Would you do it?
I had $2,000 to my name before Big Leagues. During the offseason in the Minors, you need to go home and immediately get a job.
Players were responsible for 98% of postgame dinners until AA and AAA. In rookie ball and A ball, you are seldom given food besides PB&J and fruit. In 2005, there were far less resources than there are today, no Uber, DoorDash, etc. You had to be familiar with seeking out a cab, or else you would be left with no options to get healthy food or any at all.
I played Fort Wayne, IN in 2007 and everyone gained weight. We only had access to fast food. In A ball and further up the ranks, conditions got better.
I have noticed positive change over time. In the organizations that I played for, there are enough resources for certain things. The pay has increased from $20 to $25 for meal money. Sometimes you don’t even want the food that they provide, but you are not in a position to turn it down. In 2015, I knew what I was in for. I traveled with a bag of protein bars and occasionally that would be my dinner because that was better than what the clubhouse spread had to offer.
In 2009, I was in Portland, OR. Routinely, we had 3 AM buses to the airport. I was an early riser but that’s difficult for everybody.
Sometimes I just went to the field early to get some sleep. We ended up sleeping in our trainer’s room in Midland, TX because we kept finding dead bugs on the sheets and throughout our room.
If this was not professional baseball, a lot of stadium would be deemed hazardous work environments.
New Orleans was a rough stadium to play in. In 2009, shortly after Katrina, there were termites everywhere. I played in some unique conditions. It was like playing in a blizzard but there were termites.
Pro ball was an enormous step down from college for a lot of guys. They would come from these big schools and I would hear, “College was awesome, we stayed in nice places, played in front of so many people. The Minors were way different.”
I had the resources to eat, sleep, and live, but not everyone had that opportunity.
You make $6,000-10,000 a year through salary and $25 for meal money daily. It still does not add up to millions of dollars.
There are beautiful things about the system that do help, but it is broken for most people.
It would only take a couple million dollars to pay the entire MiLB system."
- Kyle Blanks