MLB Teams’ Payroll, Valuations, and Revenues, in Millions, Between 2011 and 2015

Pretty clearly, the existing structure is far more beneficial to owners than it is to players. The current labor agreement—the one that expires next December—is a large part of the reason for this asymmetry. In November, it was announced that the minimum salary for a MLB player will remain $507,500, the same as last year’s figure. Without question, over half a million dollars is a significant amount of money. Equally without question, though, is this: Major League Baseball players are grossly underpaid. And their minor league counterparts are even worse off.

Ironically, while the labor agreement between players and owners has long favored owners, much of the current inequity is a function of the same focus on analytics that’s changed the way the game is played and how players are valued. Just as scouts and analysts now know more about how best to utilize the talent on their rosters, general managers are now far more savvy about how best to populate that roster in the first place. And, with few exceptions, the approach they end up taking is to fill their rosters with relatively affordable young players.

Young players come with two primary advantages. The first is obvious: They’re cheaper than their veteran counterparts. This is by design: Even though the agreement between players and owners covers both the major and minor leagues, only Major Leaguers have the right to vote on it. As a result, veterans helped craft a deal that is most advantageous to themselves, leaving younger players relatively worse off.

In broad strokes, the current compensation system works something like this: Most players, upon entering the league, make the league-wide minimum for their first three seasons. Starting in their fourth year, they can start to make larger and larger percentages of what they might make on the open market. And after six years of MLB service , a player becomes eligible for free agency, at which point he can finally see the sort of compensation that most people associate with pro athletes.

Yet savvy owners have figured out a way to put off fully realized salaries for longer than that: They can leave players likely to be superstars in the minor leagues for an extra week or two at the beginning of their careers and effectively squeeze out a seventh year before those players can reach free agency. This practice recently received widespread attention because of the Cubs’ treatment of the 2015 Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant—which was blatant enough for Bryant to file a grievance—but this was by no means an exceptional case. The league is littered with young stars who’ll reach free agency a year later than they reasonably should have.