Meet the Former MLB Hopeful Turned Lawyer Fighting to Reform the Minor Leauges

Garrett Broshuis was once a baseball player trying to make the big leagues. A third-team All-American at Missouri and then a fifth-round pick by the San Francisco Giants in 2004, he spent six years toiling in the minor leagues before hanging up his glove and becoming a lawyer. Now he's now heading an effort to reform the minor league system and how players are paid.

Today, Broshuis is a lawyer at Korein Tillery, and a leading attorney in two lawsuits against Major League Baseball. One is on behalf of scouts. The other, which has gained more attention, is asking for fair wages for minor league players. It has put the spotlight on the low salaries of minor leaguers and put MLB in court trying to defend it. It also has led to a noxious PR battle, including a bill introduced in Congress called the Save America's Pastime Act.

The lawsuit had a setback in July when its class action was decertified after more than 2,200 current and former minor league players had opted into the class and the suit. Last week, the plaintiffs got the OK from the federal court judge to reapply for certification, though with smaller classes.

In a conversation with VICE Sports, Broshuis shared some of his minor league horror stories and explained why a former MLB hopeful would take on the organization in court and in a battle for public opinion.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

VICE Sports: You were a minor league baseball player and a fifth-round pick. How would you assess your career now that you're removed from it?

Garrett Broshuis: My career was probably like a lot of people's careers I had some good days and some bad days. I struck out a guy named David Ortiz one day when he was on a reassignment, but then again I gave up a grand slam to a pitcher once, which is something that's not very good to do. I had some ups and downs. I had one year where I led all of minor league baseball—I had a 3-17 season even though I had a 3.8 ERA. Then I bounced from that and had a good season the next year. In the end, I wasn't quite good enough to make it.

Even before you got to be a lawyer and took on this case, you were blogging about your life in the minors. Considering what life is like for minor leaguers and the pressure and microscope you're under, why be open back then, when you still were trying to impress the Giants and other teams?

I wrote for two magazines, Baseball America and The Sporting News. Some of my stuff I think you can still find on Baseball America. The Sporting News archives, I think, are gone. [Editor's note: They're gone.]

I wrote for a couple years. When I first started writing I had to clear everything with the Giants. I had to actually email every story that I did to them, so they had to approve every one of them. That sort of went on for the first year; then I stopped emailing them to them and I started being a little more open about what I was writing.

I had one article where I showed what minor league conditions really were. We had rented this old dump of a house that was a little further from the ballpark and in a bad neighborhood when I was in Double-A Norwich, Connecticut. I went to pick up my wife from the airport on her first trip out to see me—I hadn't seen her in probably six weeks—so I was little worried about her coming to this place, because the landlord never cut the grass and the grass was a foot high, we didn't have any furniture in the place, and instead of a dining room table we had two old sawhorses that we had found and we put a piece of plywood on it. So I was already worried.

I walk in the door and my roommates are all just huddled around, saying, "You're not going to believe what happened." I walk into the living room and there's just this waterfall falling through the ceiling. What had happened was that the tenant that was above us had left her toilet overflowing and so we had toilet water that was falling through the ceiling. Then of course it took about a month for the landlord to fix it. We had all kinds of mold growing. That's where we were sleeping each night, knowing there was mold all over the house. So those were the types of stories I started telling a little more as my career progressed.

Obviously you can only speak about first-hand experience for yourself, but do you think that's the life for most minor league players?

A lot of guys are living in similar situations. A lot of guys pack four or five guys into a two-bedroom apartment, with one guy sleeping on an air mattress in the living room and then two guys sleeping on air mattresses in each one of the bedrooms. I've known guys sleeping on air mattresses in the kitchen. I saw that in an apartment, too. Guys do whatever they can to split that rent as many ways as possible. That's why we're doing this [lawsuit], to try to change those things. Not to try to make guys rich but just to try to allow guys to earn enough to just live like you and me.

I found an article you wrote while you were still in law school for Harvard Law's Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law. Let me just quote it for you. You said, "Armed with a court-awarded antitrust exemption solidified by legislation, Major League Baseball has continually and systematically exploited minor leaguers. This has resulted in limited player mobility, limited bargaining power, and salaries placing many players below the federal individual poverty level. Unless minor leaguers gain true and real representation at the bargaining table, the exploitation will continue."

So I take it this is something you've been thinking about for a while and, to that effect, why you went to law school in the first place?

This is something that a lot of guys think about whenever they're playing. Since there isn't a union, there hasn't been any type of collective power to sort of push back against the owners' ability to collude and set salaries at an artificially low level. We are talking about wages that are set through without the free market—in fact, it's the exact opposite of a free market. So that's why you see the wages being set so low. A lot of guys recognize the amount of hours they're putting in at the ballpark and realize they're making probably $3-4 at the end of the day.

During my last year of playing, a few of us talked about the idea of unionizing and I even reached out to an older labor lawyer that had experience in baseball, a guy named Don Wollett, who's since passed away—a wonderful, wonderful man who had written a book on the possibility of unionizing minor leaguers. We had a number of conversations, too, that he reached out to the union. It was probably just a little too early and the time wasn't right. I'm hoping as more light is brought on these issues that hopefully someday a minor league union could come about.

Obviously, when the CBA is negotiated it's about major league players first and minor league players are on the backburner. With no union explicitly for minor league players, to protect them, do you think that lawsuits and courts are the only way to bring about change right now for their working conditions?

It's an alternative method. We have these laws for a reason: to protect people from these types of situations. So yeah, it certainly a viable alternative.

Where did the lawsuit for higher wages and mobility for scouts come from? What's the rationale and reasoning behind that?

The abuses don't stop with the minor league players. The owners are all trying to push their ability to collude as far as they can. This is certainly for scouts as well. They are a population of workers that does terrific work and really are just working their tails off, day after day, going on the road, looking at these players and trying to find that next diamond in the rough. In a lot of ways I don't think that's appreciated anymore. Their salaries are artificially low, as well. That's what that salary is about.

What do you think of Major League Baseball's response to your lawsuits?

I think it's shortsighted and I also think that, like a lot of organizations that are used to doing something a certain way, they aren't going to change their practices until they are told that they have to. So it takes a lot of pressure for an organization like that to have to change its practices.

It seems like at this point you're stuck in a sort of PR game, too. There was the Save America's Pastime bill. It's almost a matter of whose voice can carry farther at this point, and they have a bullhorn while you obviously can't be as loud. Can you win that battle for the public's opinions and minds?

I think that's the only way to describe it: They have a bullhorn and I'm here with one small voice in the Midwest. It is certainly a challenge. For instance, if [MLB commissioner] Rob Manfred wants to talk about something at a press conference, well, he's gonna have a lot of reporters listening to everything that he says and reporting on everything that he says. Or if Major League Baseball wants to lobby Congress, as they did, they can get a bill introduced quickly to try to further exploit their already exploitative positions. So yeah, it's tough to compete with that.

On the other hand, we believe we're on the right side of justice. We certainly wouldn't compare our efforts to Martin Luther King in any way nor any type of civil rights movement, but to paraphrase him, the absolute arc of history moves towards justice.

Have you heard from current minor leaguers or major leaguers in support of what you're doing?

We've heard from a number of minor league players and there's been a tremendous outpouring of support. Any time I hear from one of those players it warms my heart a little bit. We've heard from some major league players, too. Curtis Granderson has had some supportive comments in the past. There were some other major leaguers that spoke out against this poorly named and misleading Save America's Pastime Act because it's a deceiving act. So we've had a lot of support from players and we're happy to have that support.

Do you feel any conflicted emotions or remorse about taking on Major League Baseball? It's a sport you played for a long time, you aspired to be a major leaguer, and now you're fighting them in court.

I'm still a fan of baseball, going to baseball games, but I have a two-year-old son, for instance. I don't know whether he's going to be a baseball player or not. I don't know if he's gonna be a basketball player or if he'll like sports at all. But for the sake of argument, if he did go into baseball and was fortunate enough to get an opportunity to play professionally, I wouldn't want him to have the same wage scale that is currently in place. A lot of other guys would say that too. A lot of other players will say that they're doing this so their cousin doesn't have to go through it, or if they're coaching so the players that they're coaching don't have to go through this. You have to separate your love for something from the need to do what's right.

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