The Royals are receiving lots of kudos for paying minor league player and the team’s staff while other teams cut pay and and stipends. Here’s one example:

Here is another that tries to embarrass other teams into doing the same:

While baseball finances are murky at best and opaque in most instances, most people agree that the Royals are one of the lower-revenue franchises in the game. They are also near the bottom as far as franchise value goes. Finally, they have the newest ownership group in all of baseball, which means that the group almost certainly has a lot of debt and very little if any equity in the franchise. Any way you slice it, cashflow is likely tighter in Kansas City than almost anywhere else.

Yet the Royals are paying minor leaguers and front office employees while a great number of other teams are not. What’s their excuse?

Sports.Yahoo.com

Revenues are not everything, however. Expenses are important, as is the source of the revenue. This site projected the Royals payroll over a full season to come at about $82 million, the fifth lowest in the game. Note that the Royals do not need to generate that much local revenue to cover that payroll, since the Fox, TBS, and ESPN national broadcast deals generate about $50 million in revenue per team per year. Teams with payrolls near around $200 million need to generate a lot more local revenue to cover their expenses. In a way, they are using other people’s money, as they rarely appear on national broadcasts and have a net positive inflow of money from revenue sharing and the competitive balance tax.

So the Royals can afford not to cut, because their frugality (which in general is criticized) allows them to pay salaries with low local revenue. The new owner gets tons of good publicity, thanks to MLB subsidies.