“Become a major league baseball player, even for a single game, and you join one of the most exclusive fraternities ever. And today, with salaries ranging from the fantastic to the obscene, virtually none of the players who now qualify for the fabulous MLB pension plan should ever have to use it. So why can’t the millionaire ballplayers and the billionaire owners find a way to take care of the few (and ever dwindling) number of former players who don’t qualify for inclusion, yet so desperately need the help?

“While the players and owners certainly are within their legal rights to exclude these fellow athletes, that doesn’t make it morally right, and Gladstone comes up clutch by exposing a sad, desperate, and shameful chapter of baseball’s labor history.”

Mark Schraf, author of Cooperstown Verses: Poems About Each Hall of Famer and managing editor of SPITBALL: The Literary Baseball Magazine