Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore is receiving some positive attention for his comments about why his organization will continue to pay minor leaguers even though there are currently no minor league seasons, and even though some other teams are releasing players to cut costs.
Moore explained that they will continue to pay their minor leaguers through the end of the season because they believe it is important for the overall good of the sport of baseball.
In a conference call with local media members today, Royals GM Dayton Moore said this about the club's decision to stand by their minor league players: pic.twitter.com/8ZfWWx95Jh
— Alec Lewis (@alec_lewis) May 29, 2020
“Understand this: The minor league players, the players you’ll never know about, the players that never get out of rookie ball or High-A, those players have as much impact on the growth of our game than 10-year or 15-year veteran players. They have as much opportunity to influence the growth of our game as those individuals who played for a long time because those individuals go back into their communities and teach the game, work in academics, are JUCO coaches, college coaches, scouts, coaches in pro baseball. They’re growing the game constantly because they’re so passionate about it. So we felt it was really, really important not to release one minor league player during this time, a time we needed to stand behind them,” Moore said.
That is just a great answer and reason. The Royals are also not furloughing or laying off any employees within the front office and instead have instituted tiered pay cuts at the upper levels.
We don’t have insight into the financial standing of organizations that did release players. Maybe they really just could not afford it. But you just have to figure that for what is such a minor cost in the big picture, the benefit of treating these players well was so much greater in the long run, for exactly the reason Moore explained. It’s a wonder that MLB as a whole did not figure this out, but they’re also in a labor dispute with their players during a pandemic, so we really can’t put anything past them when it comes to bad big-picture business decisions.
