Even the most knowledgeable baseball fan probably doesn’t remember Angel Luis Alcaraz Acosta, who played in the big leagues in 1967 and 1968 for the Los Angeles Dodgers and 1969 and 1970 for the Kansas City Royals.
A graduate of Ana Roque High School in Humacao, Puerto Rico, Alcaraz was a reserve infielder who, in parts of four seasons, appeared in 115 games, came up to the plate 365 times, collected 70 hits, including four home runs, nine doubles and two triples, scored 30 times and had 29 runs batted in,
Alcaraz, who now lives in Venus Gardens-Rio Piedras, in San Juan, turned 84 years-old this past June.
For his time playing the game he loved, Alcaraz earned the princely salary of $8,000 during his last season playing for the Dodgers; in his first season playing for the Royals, he got a raise to $10,000.
Alcaraz would most likely be a footnote in the annals of the national pastime if it weren’t for one thing: he’s now among the 498 retired ballplayers not receiving Major League Baseball (MLB) pensions.
I am thinking of Alcaraz because he has all but been forgotten by today’s players.
For that matter, so too has San Juan’s Sergio Ferrer, who played for the Minnesota Twins in 1974 and 1975 before finishing up his career with the New York Mets in 1978 and 1979. In his rookie season, Ferrer was paid $7,800.
See, in 1980, the vesting rules for a pension changed. It used to be a player needed four years of service to be eligible for one but, ever since, it’s only been 43 days.
It was a sweetheart deal the league offered the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA), which is the union that represents the current players, with one notable caveat: the pre-1980 players like Alcaraz and Ferrer were not retroactively included.
So for the past 45 years, post-1980 players like New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor — a prominent member of the union who in 2021 signed a 10-year, $341 million contract extension — have only needed 43 game days of service on an active roster to get a pension. And their designated beneficiaries get to keep that pension.
Instead of MLB pensions, all pre-1980 players like Alcaraz get is a yearly payment of up to $11,500 for every 43 game days of service they accrued on an active MLB roster. Given the time he spent with Los Angeles and Kansas City, it's more likely that Alcaraz gets a bone of $5,500 thrown at him. And that's before taxes are taken out.
What's more, the payment cannot be passed on to anyone. So when Alcaraz dies, whoever his designated beneficiary is will not receive the bone he’s being thrown.
But do you hear this issue being bandied about by today’s ballplayers in advance of the collective bargaining negotiations that are soon to get underway? Of course not.
Under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement between the union and MLB, the league doesn’t have to bargain about the pre-1980 players unless the union first broaches it. As for the MLBPA, it doesn’t owe these retirees what is known as the “duty of fair representation”, i.e, once they’re out of the game, the union doesn’t have to provide legal guidance or counsel to them.
What makes this unseemly is that the national pastime is doing great financially. The average salary is $5.1 million, the minimum salary is $760,000 and, according to my friend and fellow SABR member Max Effgen, the Major League Baseball Players Pension Plan currently has $4.6 billion in assets, with 9,670 participants; that is an increase of $400 million in assets with 177 fewer participants from 2022.
Are both MLB and MLBPA suggesting they can't afford to pay these men more?
If anyone can help these men it’s Lindor, a native son of Caguas, Puerto Rico who, as a member of the eight-member players’ union executive committee, is in a position to go to MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark and insist that this injustice be remedied once and for all.
Listen, nobody begrudges anyone his money. This is, after all, still a capitalist country.
But if it weren’t for the guys like Ferrer and Alcaraz, who endured labor stoppages and went without paychecks so free agency could occur in the first place, do you think Lindor would be in a position to be getting the kind of big money he’s making?
Lindor’s nickname is “Mr. Smile.” By doing the right thing, he can put a smile on the face of Alcaraz, Ferrer and 496 other men.
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