When I wrote my then regular The Public Ought to Know column (on which my book of the same name), I routinely scoped out topics I planned to cover. Sometimes, current events or experiences changed the order or pushed back or supplanted topics; indeed sometimes entire columns as drafted faced delay or re-write, or both. My approach to this regular Gotham Sunday blog sometimes follow a similar vein; what I planned to write about a week or several days ahead easily changed when time to compose approached. In this case I pretty much scoped out my planned column, equating it to the approaching seasonal change and to giving. An email changed all that. My friend Doug Gladstone wrote a book, A Bitter Cup of Coffee, exposing the outright failure of Major League Baseball and its Players Association to care for several hundred pre-1980 players who remain without both pensions and health coverage. Doug shared an articleabout the failure to address this outrage despite his 2010 book subtitled, “How MLB & the Players' Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve.”

Doug emailed an article, “Left out in the cold … These retired players reveal shameful MLB tale,” by Barry Rosner found yesterday in suburban Chicago’s Daily Herald.Writing about hundreds of living ex-major league baseball player, Rosner explains, “those who played before 1980 and didn't complete four years of service to qualify for a pension -- the $11.5 billion industry can't find a few extra dollars.” Imagine. The sport I love above all others where the owners make really big bucks and players tend to do rather well just ignoring the needs of those who came before.

Still the case. Doug updated his book, recently re-released, in the hope the wildly successful sport and its players association might just show some love and respect for these players and their families.

After reading the article, I shared it on Gotham’s Sportstalk email listserve and posted a tweet, which I lated shared on Facebook. I noticed Doug shared his own tweet on the article and another on his own op-ed about an affected Savannah resident.

As the 1973 song by Manassas goes,

Isn’t It About Time?