Spring Marie Cullen – Baseball Prospectus ($): I grew up playing baseball, and I faced some hazing thanks to being a bigger kid. Any hazing or hard times I ever received paled in comparison next to the grief given to the few girls I played with. It didn’t matter how good they were or how many of the boys there were better than, they always had more hoops to jump through and more ridicule to deal with. I can’t lay claim to being a good ally when I was growing up, and honestly, it makes me more than a little upset to realize that fellow players and their parents were making life hard on the girls I played with and I did nothing. Girls are still playing youth ball and they are still getting grief. If you are a parent at a game and you see someone giving a young girl ballplayer a hard time, speak up, it’s the least you can do.
Hannah Keyser – Yahoo! Sports: Major League Baseball has itself a problem, and it’s a problem that the league doesn’t want to admit exists. Teams, by and large, no longer view just making the playoffs as a good thing. If they will make the playoffs but exit right away then the rallying cry of “Sell, sell, sell and prepare for the coming years” has become all too common. That doesn’t make for fun baseball, and it breaks the unwritten contract between a team and its fans that said team will try to win and reward the fans for their patronage and support. There’s no getting around the cold hard fact that teams do not try to win the same as they used to, and it’s only a matter of time until MLB faces a backlash from its fans over this sad state of affairs.
Benjamin Hill – MiLB.com: Baseball is the greatest sport in the world and it unites all of us. That is all.
Lead photo courtesy of David Rosenblum – Milb.com
