Earlier this month, baseball restarted in South Korea, with teams competing in empty stadiums. In the United States, however, sports leagues remain shut down indefinitely as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.

While the stoppages haven’t generated any financial anxiety for major league athletes, minor league baseball players — who receive a small stipend during spring training and poverty wages during the season itself — are feeling the financial heat. For a time, minor leaguers were caught in an economic limbo. “They can’t take a part-time job, because they don’t know when they’ll have to depart suddenly to head back to spring training,” the Wall Street Journal explained in March. “They can’t collect unemployment, because they are technically still employed by their baseball teams. Now that they aren’t in spring training [any]more, they will no longer get the team-provided lodging and meals.”

Major League Baseball (MLB) has since announced that farm system players will get $400 a week through the end of May — a pittance that merely dramatizes the year-to-year plight of most players. Thousands of minor leaguers take home as little as $290 after sixty- to seventy-hour workweeks. The main reason: unlike their major league counterparts, minor league players don’t have a union.