Change?

After reading two stories in today’s sports’ sections, I had to talk to Clare. Women are making inroads into baseball. Maybe. If six degrees of separation matter, then Clare has a really strong connection to the new White Sox director of minor-league operations. That’s because she and Jasmine Dunston were classmates in the same sports administration master’s program. And then we have Katie Krall of Park Ridge getting hired by the Red Sox as a player-development coach at Double-A Portland. “Wow!” exclaimed my daughter on hearing the news about her former classmate. She rightly pointed out that women weren’t getting these kinds of jobs five years ago, which is true. I just wonder what kind of jobs these are. Technically, Dunston’s hiring doesn’t involve breaking new ground because she’s replacing a woman in the same capacity. According to a March 2021 post on a blog run by the team, Grace Guerrero Zwit, Dunston’s predecessor, “impressed her peers by assisting with budgets for minor league affiliates, helping to write international prospect contracts, [and] introducing education programs for young players in the Dominican Republic, among other responsibilities.” To me, that kind of sounds like the role of women in the Catholic Church, heavy on responsibility, light on power. The same goes for player-development coach, but I could be wrong. Time will tell.