I enjoy friends with rather diverse work and professional “assignments.” Not unusual to find some associated with a cause derived from their work. One such cause involves baseball. Not how the games get played. Not who plays it, coaches it, umps it or runs it. It involves how several hundred former players get screwed. As someone who advises labor unions and elected officials who make the plights of working families paramount, it infuriates this correspondent to learn an entity rolling in the dough essentially refuses to take care its own.

My friend wrote a book, A Bitter Cup of Coffee, after stumbling onto the issue. He writes op-eds and commentaries to keep up the pressure on Major League Baseball and its Players Association to address this inequity. Some recently posted to Linkedin caught my attention:

An excerpt goes:

"For the most part, baseball players nowadays are set for life. Vested retirees are able to earn as much as $210,000; even the minimum pension for someone who played after 1980 is a reported $34,000.”

The problem involves those who retired before 1980 when an agreement to avert a players strike provided that going forward, every player would automatically qualify for a pension after 43 game days of service, and qualify for health coverage after only one game day. Despite baseball’s great financial success, MLB never found any imperative – perhaps economic justice – to include a group of players often in great financial stress, many suffering ill health. Not just MLB continues to roll in the dollars, its players’ pension and welfare fund remains rather flush with $2.7 billion.

My friend Doug Gladstone emphasizes, “many of whom are filing for bankruptcy at advanced ages, having banks foreclose on their homes and are so sickly and poor that they cannot afford adequate health care coverage.”

A shanda. One can only hope those who can make a difference finally step us. No good explanation exists not to.