Minor-league baseball players generally earn seventy-five hundred dollars or less for an entire season. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSON/REDUX

For generations, minor-league baseball has been seen as the scrappier, sometimes seedier, counterpart to its big-league sibling. Games are often cloaked in strange and sometimes awkward theme nights. Some of the mascots are ragged or downright bizarre. The ballparks are smaller, and filled with fewer fans.

The fans who do come are likely unaware that the concessionaires selling them hot dogs and peanuts may very well be earning more money than the players on the field. That’s one of the allegations made by a lawsuit that has been filed on behalf of forty-three minor-league baseball players against Major League Baseball. Professional baseball “traces its roots to the nineteenth century,” the four-hundred-and-nine-page complaint, filed in California’s Northern District, notes. “Unfortunately for many of its employees, its wage and labor practices remain stuck there.”

Lawyers involved in the case, which was originally filed in February of last year and will soon begin taking depositions from players, argue that, due to a longstanding exemption from antitrust laws, Major League Baseball has been able to “openly collude” on working conditions for younger baseball players. Consequently, federal and state wage and hour laws are “routinely” violated.

The suit was filed by Garrett Broshuis, who, from 2004 to 2009, was a pitcher in the San Francisco Giants' farm system. He’s now an attorney in St. Louis, and he says that seeing the poor living conditions of his fellow-players helped shape his work as an attorney and the nature of the complaint. Through word of mouth, he began to accumulate names of players who were interested in the case. “This isn’t a free market,” he told me. “It’s a restricted market. There’s something fundamentally wrong with that.”

Depending on how you do the math, pay for minor-league baseball players may work out to something below the federal minimum wage, according to court documents. Working fifty-hour weeks—and sometimes seventy-hour weeks—minor-league baseball players generally earn between three thousand and seventy-five hundred dollars, total, during a roughly five-month championship season, with no overtime pay, according to court documents. Contracts may also restrict their ability to play overseas or for other teams, lawyers said.

A spokesman for Major League Baseball said in a statement that compensation paid by its clubs to minor-league players is “in full compliance with the law.” The league also believes that the minimum wage and overtime provisions of federal and state laws were not intended to apply to minor-league players: “It is both impractical and nonsensical to require baseball players to maintain time sheets, and to submit requests for overtime when they desire to take extra batting practice or their game goes into extra innings.”

Broshuis says that none of this excuses M.L.B. club owners from meeting basic minimum-wage and overtime requirements. “These wage violations force many minor leaguers to live in poverty,” the lawsuit alleges. “The minor leaguers sometimes cram five or six players—occasionally with wives and children—into a small apartment, often using air mattresses or couches as beds. Other minor leaguers live in the basements of host families during the season, sleeping on futons.”

Broshuis and the group of players he represents are not the first to raise concerns about minor-league pay. Testifying before Congress about baseball’s antitrust exemption, in June, 1997, the former Texas Rangers and San Francisco Giants outfielder Dan Peltier likened the league’s system to “the indentured servitude of the seventeen-hundreds.” “A team can buy you, sell you, send you to another country, or fire you whenever they want,” Peltier said. “They can cut you if you get hurt.”

While most American labor unions have struggled for the past several decades, professional baseball players comprise one of the strongest packs of organized workers in the world. Under the collective bargaining agreement that the Major League Baseball Players Association negotiated with the league’s owners, major-league ballplayers receive a minimum salary of $507,500 for the 2015 season.

But while minor-league baseball teams are affiliated with professional teams—hence the term “farm system”—minor-league players are not represented by the M.L.B.P.A. Minor-league players have never succeeded in unionizing, and don’t appear likely to anytime soon. Minor leaguers, itching for the rare spot on a major-league team, may be reluctant to speak out about labor concerns, lest they jeopardize their chances.

While money has ballooned at the big-league level, it has never made its way down to minor-league players, according to Broshuis. The salaries of major-league players have increased by more than two thousand per cent since 1976, but Broshuis estimates that the salaries of minor-league players have increased, on average, only seventy-five per cent in those same four decades. Minor-league salaries have stalled even against the rate of inflation, making the pay today worse than it was forty years ago. The haves of baseball are now mega-haves, while the have-nots are falling further behind.

This disparity isn’t unique to baseball, of course, or to sports. Other entertainment industries have their own tales of fiscal woe among those trying to make it. The difference, Broshuis said, is that while there may be many roads to getting a break in Hollywood or becoming a pop icon, there is only one path to becoming a professional ballplayer.

“If you want to be a major-league player, you have to go through M.L.B.’s system,” he said. “There’s no other game in town.”