Separate but equal is never really equal, no matter how it’s practiced. It may very well be that the breaking of the gender barrier in baseball will be ugly, fraught with incident, and unfathomably difficult. It may very well be that it is costly, painful, and rife with resentment. It may even be the case that it produces only a very few female players at the major league level. But if even one woman is kept out of the game for no good reason other than that she’s a woman, then equality of opportunity has been denied, justice has been ill served, and some team has cost itself a chance to win more games. And that’s not something a real baseball fan can countenance.