Daniel R. Epstein – FanGraphs: Women’s baseball is important, as is its history. To understand why women’s baseball is in its current state you need to understand the journey of women’s baseball. It is baseball in every way, no matter how many people try to place baseball as a men’s game. There have been ebbs and flows to the history of the women’s game, but it has always been there and has remained resilient even as society decided it didn’t need to exist. The future of the women’s game has never been brighter, the journey continues.
Craig Calcaterra – NBC Sports: Major League Baseball’s labor history is complicated but important to the current pending labor crisis. The owners had all the power and then they didn’t, only now they do again. I am, and always will be, firmly on the side of labor. I am a worker myself, I believe in the ability of people to make a living wage and be part of a community. It may not seem like those tenets apply to baseball players, but they do. The Major League Baseball Player’s Association needs to continue to stand up for labor, ownership certainly doesn’t have labor’s best interests at heart.
Jarrett Seidler – Baseball Prospectus ($): The practices undertaken by MLB teams in the international market, specifically Latin America, are abhorrent. MLB has a problem when it comes to signing young international players, and by young, I mean illegal child labor ages young. MLB and its executives know that this problem exists yet they want to bury it in the sand and pretend it’s not there. If Rob Manfred and company won’t accept responsibility for the practice of teams signing 13 and 14-year-olds to under the table contracts then we need to at least let them know how much they are damaging international communities.
Lead photo courtesy of Herzog – National Baseball Hall of Fame
