Athletics' Owner John Fisher Admits Mistake, Will Pay Minor Leaguers

The Oakland Athletics, the only organization that had decided to discontinue stipends to their minor league players as of June 1, have reversed course. The club will continue to pay the standard $400 per week through the end of the minor league season.

In one of the less surprising about-face moves in baseball of late, the Oakland A’s owner, John Fisher, has had a change of heart and the club will once again move forward paying a stipend of $400 per week to the organization’s minor leaguers.

The A’s announced early last week that the club would discontinue those payments as of June 1, but in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle Friday, the notoriously media-shy Fisher said that the payments would be resumed.

More than that, the payments will go through the end of the season. The other 29 Major League Baseball clubs all committed to paying the stipends through at least June, and about one-third of the clubs said the money would keep flowing through August. The minor league season ends on Sept. 7 this year, and all players, big league and minor league, are only paid during the season.

The ending of payments hadn’t been particularly well-received by the A’s upper management, although no one had gone on the record opposing them. Fisher told the newspaper that he talked to, among others, team president Dave Kaval, executive vice president Billy Beane and general manager David Forst.

“I changed my mind after spending a lot of time talking to our team,” Fisher said. “I concluded that I’d made a mistake.”

As bad as the original decision was from team morale and public relations standpoints, it also could not have been comfortable for Fisher to have been alone in the decision to end the weekly stipends, which will be paid retroactively for the first week of June.

“I’ve listened to our fans and others, and there is no question that this is the right thing to do,” Fisher said. “We clearly got this decision wrong. These players represent our future and we will immediately begin paying our minor-league players. I take responsibility and I’m making it right.”

The statement was a major departure for Fisher, who owns 90 percent of the A’s and who is worth an estimated $2.2 billion, not so much because he changed his mind but because in his 15 years as the majority owner of the club he’d never once talked on the record with the media.

During the conversation with the Chronicle, he said the team would be establishing an emergency assistance fund for furloughed employees; the club furloughed more than half of their employees through Oct. 31. In that Fisher and the A’s have company. Many Major League organizations have furloughed employees with the season having been shut down due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic since March 12.

Had the reversal of the paying of stipends not occurred, the A’s were positioned to get hurt badly in next week’s June draft. The draft has been trimmed from 40 rounds to five, and all players not taken in those five rounds become free agents, eligible to sign with any team. There was thought both inside and outside of the organization that players would be reticent to sign with a team that had turned its back on its minor leaguers.

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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