LOS ANGELES — Jacob Waguespack is scheduled to pitch Thursday for the Toronto Blue Jays at Dodger Stadium. Five weeks later, the Blue Jays’ season will be over. Waguespack will pack his bags and head home to Prairieville, Louisiana, a small town between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Or maybe not. This was Waguespack’s first season on a major league 40-man roster, and this will be the first offseason he can afford not to live with his parents. One reality of minor league baseball is that the paltry paychecks from April to September rarely allow enough money to be saved for rent from October to March. That means an offseason job, or two, or three, or living at home – or, in the case of Waguespack, all of the above.

“I worked for one of my family friends who’s a financial advisor,” Waguespack said. “That’s what I studied in college. I was one of his assistants. I balanced that with workouts and stuff. Also did some side jobs cutting grass or pressure washing. I like those cash jobs on the side. I was always looking for work. I’ve also been to school twice in the offseason.

“You want to be doing this,” he said Tuesday, wearing a baseball uniform, standing in the Jays’ dugout. “You don’t want to be cutting grass.”

The Blue Jays’ front office recognizes this. Over the winter they decided to do something about it. They announced all their minor league players would receive a 50 percent pay increase beginning in 2019. The idea seems like a no-brainer but it had to start somewhere, with someone.

That someone was Mike Murov, the team’s director of baseball operations. He looked at the team’s 2019 budget and ran the idea up the pole, to Vice President of Baseball Operations Ben Cherington, to General Manager Ross Atkins, and finally to team president Mark Shapiro.

“The more we talked about it, it was a very, very easy decision,” Atkins said.

Waguespack wasn’t surprised. He was traded to the Blue Jays as a minor leaguer last season in the deal that sent Aaron Loup to Philadelphia. Assigned to Triple-A Buffalo, Waguespack was introduced to a chef, and a nutritionist, and a mental skills coach. Cavan Biggio, who spent all of last season with the Jays’ Double-A affiliate, said the same perks were available to him and his teammates at that level too. When the minor-league wage increase was announced, it was consistent with a message already being sent throughout the organization’s player development department: we’re here to help you succeed.

Atkins is loathe to take proprietary credit for that message. Long before Murov proposed the wage increase, even before Shapiro was appointed team president in 2015, Atkins had heard a version of the message before. It was when he was a minor league pitcher in the Indians’ organization in the 1990s.

The Indians’ farm director at the time, Atkins said, “was making nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports psychology – all medical resources – he was making sure they were elite and cutting edge.”

That farm director? Mark Shapiro.

“For years he’s provided the best possible resources for players, has always had that mindset, and the compensation is a different way to provide resources,” Atkins said.

Major League Baseball prescribes a wage scale for first-year pros in the months after they are selected in the June amateur draft. Every other player who isn’t on the Blue Jays’ 40-man roster this year received a larger paycheck this season than he would have in 2018.

Murov said the specific cost of living in the organization’s minor-league cities factored into his equation. It wasn’t a straight 50-percent raise for every player across the board. Some lower-level minor leaguers got a larger bump. Some upper-level players received less than a 50 percent raise, but more than their younger teammates in terms of dollars and cents.

To a man, the difference does not amount to life-changing money. The public response to the announcement was probably disproportionate to the impact it’s made on the day-to-day life of a minor league player. By way of example, Murov said the player sharing a four-bedroom apartment with four players last season could perhaps share a two-bedroom apartment with two players this season.

“We rose it to an extent where we hope they can live more comfortably,” Murov said.

Within the Blue Jays organization, there’s a sense that minor league wins and losses in 2019 aren’t an accurate gauge of the impact of their decision. A better measurement might arrive next year, for the player who was able to put away some extra cash and allocate his offseason hours training for 2020, rather than sitting in an office or cutting grass.

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Angels pitching coach Mickey Callaway likes what he’s seen from Jaime Barria, Patrick Sandoval Still, among players affected by the decision, there was an immediate impact.

“We were super excited that we were the team who did that,” Waguespack said. “I got buddies on other teams who were like, ‘why the hell aren’t we doing that?’ They were frustrated. Hopefully, it’s something that can be brought across the board.”

“For them to really kind of show that extra step, of giving that 50 percent increase, makes our lives a lot easier,” Biggio said.

Maybe not every team could do this, but the Blue Jays could. Hopefully, other large-market clubs will follow suit after this season. If there has been any negative fallout from the decision, Atkins said it hasn’t landed on his shoulders. Feedback from players has been predictably positive.

“I think it was more just the acknowledgment, the message we sent that we’re going to do everything we can to help in some way,” he said. “And the interesting thing has been it’s across the board – whether it’s a player who signed for $2 million or the player who signed for $1,000. That’s been interesting to see.”