On page 1,967 of the $1.3 trillion spending bill that was posted by House and Senate members late on Wednesday evening and passed by both chambers just a little more than twenty-four hours later—and which President Trump, on Twitter, threatened to veto on Friday morning—you will find roughly a hundred and fifty words that comprise a small bit of legislation called the Save America’s Pastime Act. The provision, as it is currently written, dictates that minor-league baseball players, during the league’s championship season—i.e., not during spring training or the offseason—will be paid “at a rate that is not less than a weekly salary equal to the minimum wage” for a work week of forty hours, “irrespective of the number of hours the employee devotes to baseball related activities.” The federal minimum wage is $7.25, so what this guarantees is a monthly salary, for roughly six months out of the year, of about $1,160. Currently, the minor-league minimum is eleven hundred dollars a month, a number that has not been increased in a decade.

Why did the United States Congress make a special effort to give minor-league baseball players a sixty-dollar monthly raise? Probably because this slight increase would be a huge boon for those people who run Major League Baseball, which oversees both the big-league teams and their farm-team counterparts—and which is currently being sued by a group of players who argue that the league is violating state wage and hour laws. Players, the suit notes, regularly work between fifty and seventy hours a week with no overtime pay, and currently earn as little as three thousand dollars during a five-month season. Major League Baseball enjoys a long-standing exemption from antitrust laws, and so, the suit argues, the league has been able to “openly collude” on working conditions for younger players. (Unlike their counterparts in the bigs, minor leaguers are not represented by the Major League Baseball Players Association. Under the most recent collective-bargaining agreement, minimum annual pay for a major leaguer is $507,500.)

A spokesperson for Major League Baseball declined to comment for this piece. In the past, the league has argued that minor-league baseball is not a career but an apprenticeship, and one that is heavily subsidized by the major-league clubs that oversee the minor-league teams. Some minor-league players receive signing bonuses and benefits like health and life insurance and a twenty-five-dollar per diem for food on road trips. Representatives for the league have said that it is “in full compliance with the law” and that federal and state laws were not intended to apply to minor-league ballplayers.

Representatives for many of those players feel differently. “It’s disturbing, to say the least,” Garrett Broshuis, a St. Louis-based attorney representing the players in their case against M.L.B., said on Thursday, of the spending-bill provision. From 2004 to 2009, Broshuis was a pitcher in the San Francisco Giants’ farm system. “You have players living below the poverty line and now the league is going to be exempt from paying them?” Broshuis said that he was among those surprised to see baseball tucked into the spending bill—he first learned about the provision just this week, when reading about some of the minutae of the bill in the Washington Post.

“This was done completely in secret,” Broshuis said. “This is the opposite of how legislation should work. Normally, something is introduced, you go to committee, you have an opportunity to speak and have a rational debate.” Instead, he said, the lobbying paid for by the league “succeeded in getting this tacked onto a spending bill. It has nothing to do with government spending. It was done behind closed doors and we didn’t see the language until it came out last night. It’s appalling.”

Spokespeople for Senators Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and Congressman Kevin McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment on the baseball provision. M.L.B., like many professional sports leagues—and National Collegiate Athletic Association—maintains a robust presence in Washington. The league spent $1.3 million lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The N.F.L. spent $850,000. (The N.B.A. and the N.H.L. did not spend any money on Washington lobbying last year, according to the center, although they have done so in the past.) Lobbyists for the teams tried to put forward a bill, in 2016, that would have addressed minor-league pay, but they did not succeed. Among the league’s more recent legal concerns was a portion of the tax bill that could have crimped team owners’ ability to trade players.

On Thursday, Broshuis said that he was still “trying to assess” the impact of the Save America’s Pastime Act on the players’ lawsuit. His case currently has forty-five named minor-league players as plaintiffs; those individuals are also seeking to be class representatives for an additional twenty-two hundred players in similar situations. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is currently reviewing whether the case can remain a class-action suit.

In the meantime, many minor-league players are taking part in spring training in earnest. “That’s thousands of players who aren’t getting paid at all,” Broshuis pointed out. He worries that if wages at the different minor-league levels continue to stay where they are, it could deter young stars from embarking on a baseball career. “It doesn’t make sense at all,” he said. “When you have a first baseman that makes less than the bat boy, that’s a problem.”