Outspoken agent Scott Boras said he has a plan to fix minor league baseball's wage issue based on a bonus pool of player fines and cooperation from lower-level team owners, he said in an episode of The Athletic’s 755 Is Real podcast released Monday. Boras also said locked out players believe that the slide of competitive integrity is a "cancer on the sport.""I've got minor league plans," Boras said. "I want minor league owners, who are making millions of dollars, I want them to enforce standardization of housing. I want them to provide food for those young men when they are in their cities, because no one knows their cities better than them. And we can create standards, but I gotta have someone enforce them. And someone from the team to enforce them."Major League Baseball's owners continue to lock out its players, now in the fourth month of an elective shutdown. Representatives from the league and the players union met Saturday in New York, but little progress was made.On Friday in New York, a lawyer for MLB argued in federal court that minor league players should not be paid during spring training because, the league lawyer said, those players should be considered trainees. MLB is fighting against a lawsuit filed eight years ago by minor league players over their pay.Boras shot back at that argument."When you go to a big-league game, I realize it's taken for granted because the players are just there," Boras said. "The number of players that make it to free agency is really less than 15 percent. And the number of players that really spend three years in the major leagues, when you look at all the players who were drafted, it's well less than 1 percent. "We have to have an incentivized program to where if you play over three years in the Minor Leagues, you get a $50,000 bonus," Boras said. "Not paid by the team, but paid by a contributory pool that we put player fines and penalties in over time. If you do actually make it to the Major Leagues, and you didn't get a bonus that didn't exceed a couple million dollars, you would then be able to get an extra $500,000 from making it to the Big Leagues. So that these men who have contributed their lives, and are gonna have short Major League careers, they're getting a benefit from their Minor League service."Boras also went on to say that the biggest difference between the players' arguments over the current collective bargaining agreement and past CBAs is about competitive integrity."Sell off your free agents, it's a race to the bottom so I can get all these value draft picks and get as many as I can," Boras said, pantomiming what he believes is the stance of owners. "And it gave the fanbase a method of illustrating that losing was OK. That it was actually beneficial."And I think, when you introduce that non-competitive cancer into the sport, you've now created that the local fan does not go to the ballpark with the intent of having his team win everyday, and I think we need to reintroduce that into the game."(Photo: Mike Stobe / Getty Images)
