Craig Calcaterra, who is NBC Sports\u2019 lead baseball writer, wears his journalistic principles on his sleeve. Like a badge of honor, Calcaterra\u2019s Twitter profile notes that \u201cjournalism is printing what someone else does not want printed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Calcaterra\u2019s website points out he worked for such Columbus firms as Thompson Hine, L.L.P and Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. He was also an Assistant Attorney General for the Ohio Attorney General\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n
Calcaterra, who I have never spoken to, is clearly an accomplished individual. So it is a head scratcher why he has not written about the 641 retirees without Major League Baseball (MLB) pensions.<\/p>\n
For several years, I have emailed Calcaterra. I have tweeted him. Yet I have not received so much as an acknowledgement.<\/p>\n
Like Mr. Calcaterra, there are sports journalists today who are seemingly hesitant to report about this situation. All the retirees \u2013including former Cleveland Indians David Clyde and Wayne Cage, as well as former Cincinnati Reds pitchers Santo Alcala and Tom Carroll — are receiving is $625 for every 43 game days of service they were on an active MLB roster. Meanwhile, a pension for someone who is fully vested is worth as much as $220,000 per year, according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).<\/p>\n
The average salary of today\u2019s player is $4.47 million. The minimum salary rises to $555,000 next year. And let\u2019s not forget each team is currently valued at $1.54 billion\u2014an increase of 19 percent over 2016. The 30 owners even wrote a recent $10 million check to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Essentially, MLB chose relics over retirees.<\/p>\n
I am constantly told that today\u2019s sports journalists are afraid of losing their access to the teams they cover. But in their refusal to take the Major League Baseball Players\u2019 Association (MLBPA) and MLB to task for not awarding pensions to these men, after an averted 1980 players\u2019 strike changed the vesting rules requirements, it is my opinion that today\u2019s sports journalists are abrogating their responsibilities and doing a disservice to their readers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is much harder to be a liberal than a conservative,\u201d the late Mike Royko wrote. \u201cWhy? Because it is easier to give someone the finger than a helping hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Royko, I have always believed that, if possible, people in a position of power should help people who are not. Yet the executive director of the MLBPA, Tony Clark, refuses to help these men. Giving them a real wage of $10,000 per man is what I have suggested, since all the men who played prior to 1947 \u2013 the year the players\u2019 pension fund was established \u2013 received that sum. So there\u2019s precedent. And since no widow or loved one is allowed to keep the payment when the man dies, I have also suggested allowing the monies to be passed to a designated beneficiary for a finite time.<\/p>\n
The MLBPA is against that because it would mean less money for their current dues paying members. Of course, the MLBPA brass doesn\u2019t have a problem with earning the big bucks themselves \u2013 according to a recent IRS filing, the 72 MLBPA staff members collected $16 million in salary and benefits.<\/p>\n
Many of the affected retirees stood on picket lines so Manny Machado and Bryce Harper could earn huge free agency contracts. Are either of them going to squawk if $10,000 is awarded to a retiree like Clyde? Given the game\u2019s economy, that\u2019s chump change.<\/p>\n
Remember the late Jim Murray? He wrote a column about the 1982 game between the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins in which snowplow operator Mark Henderson, a convicted criminal on work release, cleared a spot on the field so the Patriots\u2019 field goal kicker could kick a game-winning three-pointer to give the Patriots the victory. While Henderson joked that nothing could be done to him \u2013 \u201cWhat are they gonna do, throw me in prison?\u201d \u2013 it was Murray who protested the sudden celebrity that was being accorded Henderson. Murray revealed in an article that Henderson had taken a bunch of items that were the sort of priceless family heirlooms nobody would want stolen.<\/p>\n
Like Murray, I have always believed that it is the media\u2019s role to educate people about the issues. To give them the complete picture That is why the failure of scribes such as Calcaterra to write about this egregious injustice is so disconcerting.<\/p>\n
A freelance magazine writer and journalist, Douglas J. Gladstone is the author of two books, including 2010\u2019s \u201cA Bitter Cup of Coffee.\u201d A new edition of that book is due out in early 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Craig Calcaterra, who is NBC Sports\u2019 lead baseball writer, wears his journalistic principles on his sleeve. Like a badge of honor, Calcaterra\u2019s Twitter profile notes that \u201cjournalism is printing what someone else does not want printed.\u201d Calcaterra\u2019s website points out he worked for such Columbus firms as Thompson Hine, L.L.P and Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/752"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}