PORT ST. LUCIE — A few hours before the Mets’ Grapefruit League loss to the Red Sox on Sunday, Major League Baseball Players Association chief executive Tony Clark met with the team as part of his annual tour of spring training facilities.

Considered one of the strongest unions in sports, the MLBPA began negotiating collective bargaining agreements with the league in 1968 and later helped establish the free agency system. Those benchmarks fostered exponential growth in players’ salaries and led to the nine-figure deals that have become increasingly common in today’s game.

But a few hundred yards away, minor leaguers with no such representation worked out on some of the same fields their big-league counterparts use to tune up every spring. In less than a month, most will disperse to farm teams around the country, working toward their big-league goals while they earn a salary that amounts to less than the hourly minimum wage. Their plight is the subject of a lawsuit, first filed in February, 2014 by three former minor leaguers, that seeks to apply the terms of the Fair Labor Standards Act to minor league players despite MLB’s antitrust exemption.

“We’re aware of it,” Clark said when asked about the lawsuit. “Having played in the minor leagues myself, I have an understanding as to what the concern is.”

The original lawsuit has since been consolidated with another similar case. The plaintiffs now include 34 former minor leaguers, and the suit counts Major League Baseball, former commissioner Bud Selig, and all 30 big-league teams among the defendants. St. Louis-based attorney Garrett Broshuis, a former minor leaguer himself, is representing the players. The case is in the discovery phase, with a trial scheduled for February, 2017.

Minor league salaries have increased by only 75 percent since 1976, despite over 400 percent inflation during that same time period. And though some players sign for big bonuses out of the draft or in international free agency, minor leaguers start out making only $1100 a month for the length of their seasons, with no additional compensation for the year-round conditioning work expected of professional ballplayers.

“Minor leaguers aren’t represented by the Major League union, and without a collective voice, there hasn’t been anyone to stand up for them at all,” Broshuis told USA TODAY Sports by phone. “The owners have the antitrust exemption, so they’re able to get together and collude on salaries, and set them remarkably low. So you have the combination of all-powerful owners enjoying an antitrust exemption, and players who are desperate to get into the industry and will take whatever they’re given, and those same players have no union at all.

“It’s a perfect recipe for exploitation.”

Curtis Granderson, one of the Mets’ union reps, signed a four-year, $60 million deal with the Mets before the 2014 season. Like most big-leaguers, Granderson’s big payday came only after he spent several years plying his trade in the minors against a host of players who would never see the game’s highest levels or the associated paychecks.

“If you make it, it’s great,” Granderson said. “But at the same time, not everyone’s going to make it. And currently, while you’re in the minors, you’re not making it. We’re still performing a job, and with every job in the United States, you should at least get the minimum wage. That’s my side of it.

“Even though clocked hours are considered game-time hours, there are still a lot more things that go into work. If you are only working between the start of the game and the end of the game, you’re probably going to end up without a job.”

Endeavoring a career in professional baseball, as it currently stands, requires a trade-off: Players accept low wages in the short term for the chance, however small, that they will earn millions as Major Leaguers down the road. But Broshuis maintains that, in a $9 billion industry, the lowest-level employees deserve more than just an outside chance at a big-league salary.

“In almost any industry, there are entry-level jobs,” Broshuis said. “If you want to be a carpenter, for instance, you might start as an apprentice, or if you want to be a plumber you might start as an apprentice. But those entry-level jobs are still at minimum wage or above. That’s why we have the minimum wage laws. Major League Baseball has allowed these salaries to stay stagnant for so long that guys are below the poverty line now.”

When reached for comment on the lawsuit, an MLB spokesperson referred our attention to a statement the league released in October that reads:

MLB believes that the compensation paid by its Clubs to Minor League players is in full compliance with the law. The minimum wage and overtime provisions of federal and state wage and hour laws were not intended to apply to professional athletes such as Minor League baseball players… Although the salaries received by players in the lower-levels of the Minor Leagues can be modest compared to some other jobs in this country, players typically only play in those lower-level leagues for a few seasons, and can supplement their income during the off-season.

The statement also noted that 66% of players drafted and signed in 2014 received benefits in the form of partly or fully subsidized college scholarships from their clubs under the league’s College Scholarship Plan.

But both Broshuis and Granderson asserted that more can be done to improve the relatively low standards of minor league living during seasons.

“They could work with minor league affiliates to make sure all the players have decent housing,” Broshuis said. “One of the things you see in minor league hockey, which has a union, is that those minor league hockey players have their housing provided for them. So that would certainly be helpful. Paying guys during spring training. Paying guys during the offseason. All those things would be beneficial.”

“I think the biggest one I’ve noticed is the meal money — especially now since there’s a big movement toward eating healthy, maintaining weight or either gaining weight or losing weight,” Granderson said. “In the cities you’re traveling to, your options are very limited. So trying to make 20 or 25 dollars stretch, on top of the fact that you’re not getting a meal at the stadium at certain levels, makes it very difficult for you to do the things that the team requires you to do.”

Broshuis said he knew the minor league pay scale “didn’t quite seem right” in his first year in the San Francisco Giants’ system, when a Venezuelan teammate struggled to save $20 a month to send home to his pregnant girlfriend. And in his effort to save money while playing for Class AA Connecticut, Broshuis moved into what he called, somewhat appropriately, a “crappy” apartment with several of his teammates.

“I came home one day, and there’s a waterfall streaming through into the living room because the residents above had let the toilet overflow and left it for hours,” he recalled. “Toilet water was literally flowing into our living room, and it took months to fix that. Mold was growing. Here we are, we’re supposed to be athletes going out and performing our best, and we’re sleeping on air mattresses in this moldy apartment.”

Though Broshuis anticipates many more ex-minor league players will join in the lawsuit against the league and its teams, no active players are involved, presumably because suing your team is not the best route to the Majors. Asked what advice he would give to current minor leaguers, Broshuis suggested they need representation more in keeping with that of their big-league brethren.

“These laws are there to protect guys like them,” he said. “They don’t have to go into this making wages that are below the poverty level. And my message would be to know that we’re fighting for them, we’re going to continue to fight for them, and hopefully this will embolden a lot of guys to take the next step.

“But in the end, they really do need a union. A union would be the best solution.”