Courtesy Jonathon HoweFor Wilver Perez and the Victoria Seals, the Golden Baseball League is a chance to keep playing.

VICTORIA, British Columbia -- The Victoria Seals are the sort of "we're all in this together" band of brothers where someone will give you the shirt off his back. Literally. For that matter, Victoria manager Kip Gross also has given his team the pants off his backside.

"I can't count the number of times I've given this to a player," Gross said, gesturing toward his Seals T-shirt before a game over the weekend. "Last night I took my pants off and gave them to Wilver Perez because he tore up his pants. Those are just things you have to do to survive in this league. You've got to be able to deal with stuff like that. I haven't had a jersey all year because if I had a jersey, one of the players wouldn't have a jersey.

"There's not a lot of money in this. You have to want to do this."

Which might partly explain why Bret Boone (career major league earnings: $48.8 million) lasted just five games as Victoria's manager before going home for personal reasons and handing the job over to Gross, a former major league pitcher. Boone didn't exactly give Victoria the shirt off his back but the Seals are nonetheless still selling T-shirts with his name and number -- and fans were still buying them during my stop on my Baseball in My Backyard Tour. Independent ball means never leaving a shirt to waste.

The Seals play in the Golden Baseball League, an independent minor league that stretches ridiculously from Mexico to Canada and across to Hawaii. The GBL has a salary cap of $90,000 for an entire team for the whole season (teams pay a luxury tax if they go over -- and they try very hard not to go over). It works out to just about $4,100 a player for the year, or about $1,000 a month.

Of course, that's only if the club actually pays the salary. When Seals outfielder Tim Rodriguez played for the league's Yuma (Ariz.) Scorpions franchise earlier this season, he said the players received one paycheck at the start of June but hadn't been paid again by the time he was traded to Victoria in mid-July. He says the team went without meal money for two days on a road trip to Tucson, Ariz., and ate the second day only because a teammate's mother lived in Tucson and she cooked for them.

Follow Jim Caple's "Baseball in My Backyard" series this week as he documents the baseball dream in collegiate summer ball, the independent leagues, short-season Single-A, Triple-A and the major leagues.

Read More »