Hats, jerseys and baseball cards have always been synonymous with Major League Baseball and a source of revenue for the league’s players, but in the past few years these items have begun to boost the pay for minor league and college players, too.

Bryan Wilson, director of merchandising for the Durham Bulls, has seen firsthand the demand for merchandise through his job managing the Bulls’ three different retail stores, ordering and processing goods and logo licensing.

With up to roughly 1,000 hats sold on game nights, he explained that ordering all merchandise six to eight months in advance is key, though he can only use vendors specified by Silver Lake private equity group. Silver Lake owns the licensing rights to the Bulls and 42 other Minor League Baseball teams across the country.

“My job is to make sure when the product is ordered, it’s following all the guidelines, all the style guidelines, the right color schemes, right trademarks, those little logos have to be on there,” Wilson said. “I have to make sure that those are all correct as to how we wanted to order it.”

Private equity, particularly Silver Lake and its subsidiary company, Diamond Baseball Holdings, began to emerge as a financial force in Minor League Baseball in 2021, after the Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) between MiLB and MLB, which limited the number of teams single entities could own, expired in 2020.

Players for the Morehead City Marlins also now earn a cut when hats, jerseys and baseball cards featuring them or their name are sold. The Marlins are a collegiate summer team that is part of The Coastal Plain League owned by Capitol Broadcasting Company, which also owns the Bulls,

Morehead City Marlins President David Krackower has worked for both MLB and MiLB teams, as well as independent leagues.

He said one of his favorite aspects of working at the summer collegiate level, where he is entering his fifth season, is that there is less “red tape” to go through in marketing production.

“You might have an idea you think is going to work, but there are so many rungs on the ladder that you’ve got to get that up through. You’ve got to get approvals from so many different people at the major league level, not just at your own organization, but MLB has to approve everything you want to do, [whether it’s] a fun promotion night or fun giveaway or something that might push the envelope or push the boundaries,” he said.

Krackower said this creative freedom has also helped generate merchandise that collegiate players can profit from with their name, image and likeness.

When the Major League Baseball Players Association extended its union to minor league players in 2022, the new deal included benefits such as housing, food provision, off-season wages and rights to royalties of merchandise.

Sports agent Mike Williams, who was also a minor league player from 2008 to 2010, said that what seems like small payment increases for players makes a big difference.

“It’s now been put up to a standard that allows them to survive and not eat their way through it,” he said.

However, he said royalties are a very small source of revenue for players compared to the payments provided through college NIL, which has become a huge industry.

Williams said college players are now making “250, 300, 400 thousand individually” with NIL deals. The average minor league player’s salary is roughly $20,000 to $35,000 depending on their development level within the farm system, according to 2024 data from Baseball America.

Wilson said that while he is now allowed to print players’ names on jerseys in store upon purchase, items like these with royalties attached do not generate a significant profit due to the constant roster shifting which takes place within the minor league teams.

“I try to stay away from name and number uniform jerseys in the store pre done, because we have so many player changes,” he said. “We can have a person who is number 13, he goes up for a month and then comes back down, and that number 13 was given away, so now he’s number 26 and I have 100 number 13s with his name on it.”

He also noted that most sales of jerseys with players’ names printed on them come from families of the players, but that the most sold jersey year-in-year-out is that of Crash Davis, the fictional main character of the movie Bull Durham.