You might see some of the best prospects in baseball getting their big league debuts any minute now. The collective bargaining agreement that governs MLB gives a team control over a player for either four or five minor league seasons, then his first six full major league seasons. But because of the way the rule is worded, a team can wring an extra year of control out of a player by leaving him in the minors for the first two weeks of the season.

This has been common knowledge since at least 2015, when the Cubs sent an obviously-ready Kris Bryant back down to the minors to work on … something as cover for delaying his free agency by a year. Bryant debuted on April 17, one day later than he’d need in order to be credited with a full year of service time. The controversies of March and April were long forgotten by season’s end, when Bryant was named NL Rookie of the Year and the Cubs went to the NLCS. In 2016, Bryant took home the NL MVP and the Cubs won their first World Series in more than a century. Chicago pretty much got away with it.

For years, MLB teams have played games with prospects’ service time, but the Bryant affair was a tipping point in terms of public acknowledgement, and yet nothing changed. Before this season, the Phillies only promoted Scott Kingery after he signed an extension that gives away his first three years of free agency, while Braves center fielder Ronald Acuña, the no. 2 prospect on the FanGraphs top 100 and someone who’d never met a professional league he hadn’t destroyed, did not break camp with the big league club. Now, after two weeks, Acuña’s still at Triple-A Gwinnett, working on some issue that might magically be fixed in the third week of June, when he’ll have stayed long enough in the minors to prevent him from earning another year of salary arbitration.

Meanwhile, a concerted lobbying effort by MLB has resulted in the inclusion of the Save America’s Pastime Act in the omnibus federal spending bill that became law last month. The Save America’s Pastime Act defangs a lawsuit alleging that MLB has been paying minor league players less than minimum wage, and it does it by exempting MLB from federal labor law. In exchange, minor leaguers will get a pay bump to $1,160 per month during the season— $7.25 per hour, for a 40-hour work week, five months out of the year. Baseball players work 50 to 70 hours a week and have to stay in shape year-round, and they still will not be paid for spring training under the new law.

Calling it the “Save America’s Pastime Act” is as disingenuous as it is sanctimonious. MLB, an organization with an antitrust exemption and annual revenues of more than $10 billion, pays the salaries of players on affiliated minor league teams. That’s not the issue baseball faces here, leaving aside the question of whether a business model that can’t afford to pay its workers appropriately should continue to exist. It would take a trivial amount of money from MLB to make a life-changing difference for minor leaguers, most of whom play for a pittance. Top draft picks get million-dollar bonuses, but the MLB-mandated bonus slots drop below $1 million at pick no. 64 this year. More than 1,200 players get drafted every year, and the majority of them get four- or five-figure signing bonuses. Those bonuses, minus taxes and agent’s fees, constitute the bulk of their baseball-related income until they get called up to the majors, which can take a year, five years, or 10 years—if that call ever comes.

Even so, MLB has gone to great lengths to withhold that money from its most vulnerable workers. Baseball, if that’s what they mean by “America’s pastime,” never faced an existential threat from bloated minor league salaries. They’re doing this because they can.

While MLB is squeezing every last dime out of 20-year-old pro athletes who sleep in closets and live on PB&J, the NBA is giving its minor leaguers a raise. Next season, G League players will earn $35,000 per year, plus benefits, constituting a raise of 84 percent for some players. (NBA teams pay the salaries of players on their G League affiliates.) You won’t get rich making $35,000 per year, and it’s still not a great look for a league that pulls in $8 billion a season, but you can live on $35,000, as opposed to the $6,000 or so most minor league baseball players will make each season.

For most of professional baseball’s existence, there’s also been minor league baseball—it’s an essential part of the game’s identity, and the most essential minor league in American sports. Apart from Mariners pitcher Mike Leake, who went straight from Arizona State to the big leagues, and a few Japanese and Korean veterans, every player in MLB spent at least some time in the minors.

The G League, however, has only been around since 2001, in which time it has ballooned from eight teams to 27. NBA teams have discovered the value of the G League not only for player development, but as a tactical test bed. (The pace-and-space system you see the Rockets running now was pioneered by the G League’s Rio Grande Valley Vipers, for instance.) Players who don’t make the NBA cut right out of college often head overseas, where you can make a good living playing professional basketball, and NBA clubs are recognizing the value of being able to keep potential roster players closer to home, where they can be recalled midseason. That’s why, despite being a commercial nonentity, the G League is not only surviving but expanding.

But even basketball players don’t have it as good as minor league hockey players. In the AHL, one level below the NHL, players will make a minimum of $47,500 per year next season, plus playoff bonuses, moving expenses at the beginning and end of the season, a $75 per diem on the road, and career counseling if the player decides not to pursue hockey. That’s not only a living wage; that’s positively middle class, and AHL rosters are stocked with players with two-way NHL deals making six-figure salaries. In the ECHL, the lowest level of affiliated North American hockey, the rookie minimum for the current season is $460 per week, which isn’t much, but still beats the $1,160 per month minor league baseball players make.

So why do minor league basketball and hockey players get a better deal than minor league baseball players, despite those leagues’ parent clubs bringing in less money overall? It’s not because basketball and hockey owners are less interested in maximizing profits at all costs—many baseball owners have a stake in another pro team, and even if the people running the NBA, NHL, and MLB aren’t literally the same people, they all went to the same business schools and hang out at the same golf courses.

No, it’s about power and leverage.

American basketball and baseball players come from varied backgrounds, but almost all American pro basketball players attend at least one year of college, on a full scholarship. Some basketball players leave school early to pursue pro careers, but a lot of the edge cases—players who’d be bound for the minors or Europe—stay for four years of a full ride. That’s not adequate compensation compared to what they give a school, but the option to pursue a college degree for free isn’t nothing.

Full NCAA baseball scholarships are almost unheard of, as schools have to dole out 11.7 scholarships per year across up to 27 players on a 35-person roster. Plus, the crop of underpaid minor league baseball players includes not only Americans with nothing more than a high school education, but Latin American players, many of whom grew up in poverty, and who’d have to leave the country if they chose to pursue another career.

Basketball players also have the option of playing overseas, which baseball players don’t. Not only are there fewer full-time professional baseball leagues worldwide, MLB and its two top international competitors, Japan’s NPB and South Korea’s KBO, tend to only reach across the Pacific to grab established veterans. They almost never dip into each other’s developmental pipelines, amateur or professional. In fact, when the Orioles signed Korean high school pitcher Kim Seong-min in 2012, KBO kicked Orioles scouts out of the country completely. It’s not unheard of for high-level basketball and hockey players to bypass even the traditional North American amateur system and go pro in Europe before coming back to the NBA or NHL. Brandon Jennings pioneered that path by going from high school to Italy to the NBA, and Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews spent a year in Switzerland before he was drafted first overall, rather than going to college or playing in a Canadian major junior league.

Hockey players not only have the same option to play overseas as basketball players, they tend to come from more privileged backgrounds. Almost every high school and college in the U.S. has a basketball team, but ice hockey is a varsity sport mostly at elite northern institutions. That means hockey players tend not to hang onto the game as a means of escaping poverty, and those who went to college can fall back on a brand-name education. It also shrinks the player pool. Meanwhile, if Acuña grows frustrated with baseball and decides to go become a dentist, there are thousands of people eager to replace him, while there are relatively few high-level amateur hockey players.

But most importantly, minor league hockey players, unlike minor league baseball and basketball players, are unionized. The Professional Hockey Players Association—which is distinct from the NHLPA—gives AHL and ECHL players the opportunity to negotiate collectively with their employers to make sure they’re not sleeping in their cars. It’s no coincidence that unionized employees end up with better pay and benefits than those who throw themselves at the mercy of a unilateral employment diktat.

There are numerous reasons why paying minor league baseball players a living wage, and not screwing around with their big league service time, would be beneficial for MLB clubs as well. They’d end up with fitter, happier employees able to devote themselves more fully to their craft, and eliminate a potential public relations black eye. Every team could pay its minor leaguers $30,000 a year for about $4.5 million, or the cost of a decent free agent reliever. Instead, the league got together and spent $1.3 million a year on lobbying in 2016 and 2017, and made the problem go away forever, or at least until Congress becomes aggressively pro-labor, which might be effectively the same thing.

But those positive arguments are naïve and doomed to fail. The billionaires behind MLB, people with more money than they can ever spend, people who will never experience need, still haven’t listened to “should” or even right and wrong. They’ll continue to dole out four-digit salaries to the most vulnerable people in the game, no matter what the NHL and NBA are doing, no matter how little it costs, and no matter the public relations beating they take.

They’ll continue to do it because nobody—not a labor union, not a foreign competitor, and as of last month, not even the government—is willing or able to stand up and make them stop.