Ever since the Minor League Baseball Relief Act was first announced in June, the only news about the bill — which would provide $550 million in federal cash to aid minor-league baseball teams — has been a lot of bloviating from minor-league baseball owners and Congressfolk from states with lots of minor-league teams about how necessary it is to funnel a whole mess of cash to team owners, because the pandemic. But is this something that’s actually likely to win notice in Washington, or just another attempted pile-on bill for an industry that figures there’s more where the Paycheck Protection Program came from?
I’ve now concluded some research, to the best of my abilities given that August during a pandemic turns out not to be the ideal time to get D.C. staffers to answer the phone, and here’s what I’ve found, or can speculate:
- The bill would take $550 million in unused money from PPP and other programs and dedicate it to any minor-league or independent-league baseball teams that saw their gross revenues fall by more than 75% in 2020, which is to say pretty much all minor-league and independent-league baseball teams, given that none of them played games or sold tickets in 2020. The only exception: Teams majority-owned by MLB team owners would not be eligible.
- The bill’s language appears entirely copy-and-pasted from the Shuttered Venue Operating Grant program, which has provided more than $7.5 billion to bail out small theaters and music clubs that were forced to shutter during the pandemic — the Minor League Baseball Relief Act has an identical list of covered uses: payroll, rent, utilities, debt payments, local taxes, etc. However, it diverges from SVOG in one important way: Whereas any theater owners who received PPP money after December 2020 have their SVOG grants reduced by that amount, minor-league baseball owners would be free to double-dip, keeping their nearly $40 million in 2021 PPP cash and getting another $550 million on top of that.
- The baseball bailout was introduced in both houses of Congress in June, but so far there’s been no indication that it has any hearings or committee votes on the horizon. I asked bill sponsors Rep. Doris Matsui and Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Richard Blumenthal, Mark Warner, and Tim Kaine, as well as the House and Senate small business committees, and didn’t get back anything specific about a timeline for action on the bill. (Kaine’s office wrote: “No updates at this time but we are happy to circle back with you if we have anything to share.”) Given the number of throw-subsidy-demands-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks bills for other industries like hotels that have been kicking around and going nowhere, this seems likely to be the case for the baseball one as well.
So given all that, why are we still hearing so much about a minor-league baseball bailout? (Look, here’s the Fort Wayne TinCaps president again urging fans to write their elected representatives, just like he did last month.) Probably because of the old principle of “you can’t get if you don’t ask,” plus the number of minor-league teams with easy access to media sports departments to keep this story alive. Not that it’s 100% dead — nothing with rich private-equity goons willing to throw money at lobbyists ever will be — but it does appear to be dormant, if only because Congress has bigger fish to fry and no desire to open the floodgates to every other industry in the nation requesting their own legislation. More news as it develops, or if some more Congressional staffers finally pick up their phones, but for the moment we can probably stop talking about this.