Allison McCague – FanGraphs: Enjoying Major League Baseball is increasingly difficult these days. With each new scandal or incendiary revelation, it’s harder and harder to want to keep tuning in or paying attention. Baseball itself is fine, but its premier organization is in the middle of a stretch of bad news and decisions that feels like it will never stop. The problem is that history tells us MLB has always been this way, we just pay attention more now. Perhaps the best way to enjoy MLB is to treat them not as the monolith of baseball, but as nothing more than another organization within baseball.
Sarah Griffin – Wix: Minor League Baseball, whether as the actual entity or just the concept of the minor leagues, is a baseball institution. I’ve waxed poetic about this countless times over the years, even moreso recently. The number of young children who become baseball fans because of the affordable and fun entertainment provided by MiLB can’t ever properly be measured. In a day and age when MLB is struggling with popularity, though not revenue, it’s insane that they would want to seal off a surefire way to make baseball fans for life. Then I remember that MLB only cares about creating new MLB fans and not new baseball fans and their stance towards MiLB makes more sense.
Ken Schultz – Outsports: There’s a good chance that next year Curt Schilling will be the lone living inductee into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Setting aside that under no circumstances does Schilling deserve the honor of being in the Hall of Fame just think about the disaster of Schilling having an entire weekend to deliver his toxic viewpoints unfettered? An entire weekend meant to celebrate the greatness of baseball reduced to remembrances of the greatness of the Nazi state, why trans folk don’t deserve to exist, how Muslims should be eradicated from the planet, why women don’t belong anywhere but the kitchen, etc. This could happen and if it does every single person who voted him into the Hall needs to be held accountable for their support of these viewpoints.
Lead photo courtesy of Jim Davis – The Boston Globe
