Didn’t want baseball’s All-Star Game argument to float off into its regularly scheduled lassitude without a few Sunday observations, submitted with typically dubious respect to all parties.
The yanking of the 2021 Atlanta showcase is the best thing to happen to the major league All-Star Game since 2020, when it was canceled altogether, which was the best thing to happen to it since 2016, when the Lords of the Game decided it would no longer determine which league got home field advantage for the World Series, a historical brain cramp that somehow lasted 16 years.
From the standpoint of entertainment, the only downside is that they’re going to play it anyway. From beauteous Coors Field in Denver, home of the always reliable Rockies Horror Pitching Show, baseball will dutifully fill that Tuesday night in July for an ever-dwindling national audience.
The real horror show is the new Georgia law that forced baseball’s hand once corporate heavyweights (real and potential sponsors) began objecting to what looks suspiciously like a multi-front assault on — what’s it called? — American Democracy.
We’re in a seemingly endless news cycle of political gibble gabble debating the real impact of the new law, but there’s no getting around the fact that it makes it harder to get absentee ballots, that it eliminates most drop boxes for ballots, that it makes it harder for working people to vote, that it virtually guarantees longer and slower lines at the polls, and that it makes it a crime for anyone to hand you a water bottle or a snack while you’re waiting.
Regardless of which party designed and installed such a system, MLB would have had little choice but to take its show elsewhere. Baseball’s reaction has precedent. In the early ’90s, when NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue didn’t like the smell of Arizona’s reluctance for a Martin Luther King holiday, he pulled the Super Bowl out of Phoenix with a blunt understanding that Arizona could call back when they fixed that. As recently as 2017, the NBA pulled its All-Star Game out of North Carolina, which had just passed the so-called Bathroom Bill, banning city governments from passing ordinances to protect its LGBTQ citizens. Georgia’s move to restrict voting is broader and more fundamental than either of those.
“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.”
Manfred surely knows that 30 percent of Georgia and more than half of Atlanta is Black, so I’ll take the commish at his word, but baseball needn’t strain itself with a lot of back-patting over this, either. It was the fourth of the four major American sports to formally address the George Floyd matter and the resultant global protests, and no one needs to be reminded that the Emancipation Proclamation was some 84 years old before it emancipated anyone into Major League Baseball. Cynics have pointed out that Manfred’s only acting here for the benefit of the owners, who stood to lose sponsorship money if corporations had another three months to think the Georgia thing over.
Predictably, the party that benefits when fewer Blacks vote screeched in horror at baseball’s move, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (not a serious person), yelping about corporations becoming vehicles for “far-left mobs.”
Baseball, owned and essentially run by Republican billionaires, is not exactly anyone’s version of a far-left mob. Corporations lining up against their traditional Republican allies is something that ought to give the minority party pause instead of appearing to care more about far-left mobs than about real mobs, like the one that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
For the moment, there are five active lawsuits against the new Georgia law, a transparent attempt to allow the people running elections to get the result they want. Whether it’s through The New Georgia Project v (Ga. Secretary of State) Raffensperger, Ga. NAACP v. Raffensperger, 6th District of the AME Church v. (Ga. Governor) Kemp, Advancing Justice-Atlanta v. Raffensperger, or VoteAmerica v. Raffensperger, that law isn’t likely to stand in anything approaching its current form.
Sport and its multi-cultural athletes must continue to take difficult positions on such matters, and it’s not always easy. Baseball’s postseason includes the looming question of what happens if the Braves are a participant, or the Rangers, as Texas works assiduously on legal measures similar to Georgia’s? Or, as Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wondered via Twitter this week, “If baseball’s All-Star Game shouldn’t be played in Georgia because of that state’s voter suppression law, should the Olympics be held (in China) in the shadow of what many describe as genocide?”
Gonna guess that’s a big no, but that’s another column for another Sunday.
