The Cincinnati Reds and MLB's Collective Bargaining Agreement

To many there's this odd connotation that 'labor' and 'unions' are things of a previous age, products of the squalid conditions during the American Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s or the crumbling of those established industries a century later. There's a pinch of socialism attached to those labor unions, and perhaps the fall of multiple socialist regimes in the 1990s at the feet of capitalism led many to forget that they exist in our corner of the universe at all.

Except you're reading this on a baseball blog, a corner of the internet dedicated to one part of a near 10 billion dollar business, one that captures our allure in kid-like fashion for the bulk of the year thanks to games…