After the Jackie Robinson West team from inner-city Chicago was stripped of its Little League World Series title for having players from outside its geographical boundaries, Pirates outfielder and former NL MVP Andrew McCutchen took to The Players Tribune to offer an important counterpoint to some of the hand-wringing.

I’ll excerpt a little bit of it here, but every single word is worth reading. McCutchen points out that youth baseball has become a rich kid’s sport, and that though the Jackie Robinson West kids can no longer boast a championship, some of the adults that we now argue took advantage of them actually provided them a too-rare opportunity to showcase their skills for a broader audience.

When you’re a kid from a low-income family who has talent, how do you get recognized? Now, you have to pay thousands of dollars for the chance to be noticed in showcase tournaments in big cities. My parents loved me, but they had to work hard to put food on the table, and there wasn’t much left over. They didn’t have the option of skipping a shift to take me to a tournament over the weekend…. Fixing that problem is complicated, but when I was a kid, I looked at baseball players growing up in Latin America with a lot of envy. If you’re a talented kid in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, a team can come along and say, “We’re going to sign you for $50,000 and take you into our organization and develop you, feed you, take care of your travel.” To me, as a 14-year-old kid whose family was struggling, that would have meant everything to me. I would have taken that deal in a second. That kind of system would make the game a lot more attractive to kids from low-income families. For all the backlash around the Jackie Robinson West team “cheating,” most people are ignoring the truth of how these 12-year-old kids make it out of their towns and onto a national stage.

Again, just go read the whole thing. McCutchen even explains how he wouldn’t have pursued professional baseball at all were it not for an ACL tear that cost him a chance at a football scholarship, since the immediate allure of college football is so much greater than that of spending four or five seasons eating fast food and riding buses in the minors.

Through Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI), Major League Baseball does lots of outreach to urban communities, and dozens of alumni from that program have graduated to the sport’s professional ranks.

But baseball is a zillion-dollar industry that needs to do everything it can to ensure the best possible product, and the very notion of Andrew McCutchen doing anything else but playing baseball — awesomely and beautifully — is baffling and devastating.

It’s a tricky thing to try to figure out, and there’s certainly a thin and blurry line between providing kids with opportunities and exploiting them. But McCutchen’s case seems like it’s another good argument for doing away with the MLB Draft entirely, incentivizing domestic prospects with bigger payouts at younger ages, and incentivizing teams to pump more money into youth sports in local communities to foster loyalty and help develop talent.