5-Step guide to getting a job in pro baseball

Step 5: Want a Career in Baseball? You Need an Internship

The ultimate foot in the door to a career in professional baseball is securing an internship.

Teams hire interns at different times of the year and using different methods depending on the size of the organization, the number of interns they are willing to hire and their needs. For example, I was able to secure an internship in April with the help of a few lucky breaks.

I was teaching middle school social studies, as well as coaching high school football and baseball, but started looking around for another career opportunity and stumbled upon PBEO. Having missed the Winter Meetings, I was very late to the party, but through PBEO found an opportunity to interview for an open slot when someone backed out at the last minute. I interviewed over the phone, sold myself well, and was hired sight unseen. Thirty days later, I hopped a plane to Montana’s capital city – a place I had never been.

After the season, I earned a full-time job within the organization and was hiring interns of my own. It’s the circle of life for Minor League Baseball front office executives.

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Internships are like a tryout for a full-time job. An internship is an opportunity to show what you can do – what talents you have – and how well you can apply what you learn (similar to what a player takes from coaching). Throughout an internship, an aspiring executive will be asked to do some things he or she probably doesn’t want to do, however overwhelmingly, a general manager or another front office decision maker will never ask an intern to do something he or she has never done or would never do again. Examples include cleaning the toilets in the office, pulling tarp and dressing up in the mascot costume for a community relations appearance.

It’s true that interns aren’t compensated well. However, new laws have made it mandatory for all Minor League Baseball organizations to offer at least minimum wage and overtime. Minor league teams are no longer allowed to offer an intern a salary or stipend less than the minimum wage, plus overtime for hours over 40 in a week. That’s still not very much money, but the vast majority of minor league front office workers worked for free or a few hundred dollars per month as interns. Personally, I made $300 a month as an intern in 2011.

So why should someone subject themselves to dirty jobs for little pay? The easy answer is that it’s part of the game – it’s the way it’s always been done. Working in baseball is something that many, many people would love to do, and it’s simply an issue of supply and demand. When demand for a job goes up – as in the many people that attend the PBEO Job Fair or email their resumes all across the country looking to get their foot in the door – those doing the hiring don’t have to offer much in terms of compensation. “Oh, you don’t want to work for minimum wage? I’ve got a stack of resumes of 25 other people that do. Goodbye.”

PRO TIP: If you want to work in baseball operations, not the business side of the game, pursue jobs that are more baseball-specific, such as clubhouse manager, video operations, or analytics – though none are guaranteed to open that door for you. If you haven’t played pro ball, the deck is stacked heavily against you, especially if you don’t have any contacts inside Major League front offices. It’s not impossible, but it’s very, very difficult. Also, similar to the idea of working up through the minor leagues to find a job in a Major League front office, it’s very difficult to cross over from a business, sales or marketing role into baseball operations. 

So why did it take a new law to make Minor League front offices step up and pay minimum wages for interns (and they did it kicking and screaming, I assure you – I was one of them doing the screaming)? Because the vast majority of front offices are bottom-line strategists. They would rather hire five or ten or twenty interns at $300 or $500 per month (plus a free or discounted apartment in some cases) than to pay $2000 per month per intern. Over the course of a six-month internship, that adds up. The money the team saves could be put towards other items, like food costs or promotions, or simply left off the expense sheet.

But an internship is vital, not only because “it’s what’s always been done,” but also because of the lessons learned in the process. Interns do small tasks, but then they have an understanding why those small tasks are actually important to the everyday running of the ball club. Interns don’t have a ton of responsibility early on because no one really knows how a baseball team functions until they see it first hand up close and personal. But there are plenty of opportunities to learn, and especially to get one’s hands dirty.

If an intern wants to gain first hand responsibility, working in a small-market will offer the most opportunities. Small teams in small markets have small staffs. For instance, in Helena, we had three full-time front office staff members: the General Manager, the Assistant GM, and the Director of Game Day Operations. Everyone else in the organization was a seasonal worker (including the groundskeeper, radio broadcaster and Director of Food & Beverage, who all worked about a month prior to the season until roughly a week after the final out), a part-time game day worker, or an intern.

Because there are so many different roles and responsibilities to go around, and few full-time staff members to do it all, a lot of the smaller (yet still many rather important) jobs go to interns. This includes running the on-field promotions and social media accounts during games, creating content for the official team website, taking inventory and stocking the souvenir store, hiring and training game day workers, supervising the cleanup crew. You name it.

Such a situation also allows the front office decision-makers to see how you handle responsibility, and if a full-time job opens up during or shortly following the season, interns generally have the inside track. However, if there are no opportunities within an intern’s current organization, the General Manager, Assistant GM or other full-time employees are always willing to help out hard workers and solid contributors with references, and perhaps even making a few phone calls to their connections in other cities.

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