Baseball is “emblematic of the highest standards of integrity and morality in professional sports … Standards of conduct and the attitudes and behavior of people in the ‘big leagues’ often serve as role models for millions of children.” That was Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1978, as recounted the following year by Roger Angell in The New Yorker. Taken at face value, his statement is fairly innocuous; it might as well have been the result of a random platitude generator, built from thousands of similarly sweeping sentences about the virtues of the game. But Kuhn’s intent was as specific as his statement was broad.
The Everlasting Legacy of Melissa Ludtke, Who Dared to Join the Boys Club of the Baseball Press
