Here I am, trying to be loyal, understanding, broad-minded and forgiving, and baseball kicks me in the metaphorical snarglies on Day #1 of the Red Sox season. The Sox managed to lose yesterday to the pathetic Orioles in perhaps the most boring Opening Day I have ever watched, getting just two hits off of an assortment of bargain basement pitchers, scoring no runs, allowing only 4,000 fans into Fenway, and giving up the deciding run because its new free agent hot-shot fielder botched a sure double-play ball at second base—but I’m not even talking about that.
Let’s see just how stupid Major League Baseball is. Democrats want MLB to remove the All-Star Game from Atlanta because Georgia passed a voting regulations bill that the party is lying about. If the sport allows itself to be used this way—I’m sure many players will boycott the game without having a clue about the law—many of them look for ways to opt out of it anyway—there will be no end to such manipulation., and baseball, of all sports, cannot effort to be seen as partisan. I’ll write a full post on this mess later.
This is that post. Indeed MLB did capitulate to Democrats and pull the game, though I am not certain that “stupid” was the correct word. The right words are “cowardly,” “cynical,” and “being a weenie.” Also greedy. And completely predictable.
The move isn’t exactly stupid because it involves money and avoiding a looming crisis for owners. Baseball hasn’t had a work stoppage in decades, and to have one next year would be disastrous. They all were disastrous, but the next one will be worse. It is time for a new basic agreement between the players’ union and the owners, and the list of contentious issues has accumulated during the deceptive peace. The head of the union is Tony Clark, a former player, something of a militant, and an African-American. Indeed, African-Americans have a disproportionate influence in the union, though baseball has the lowest proportion of black players of the major team sports if you don’t count hockey, and I don’t.
When Commissioner Rob Manfred, the latest in a series of inept and bumbling dead-souled executives in that position, announced that MLB would pull its All-Star game–the so-called “Summer Classic”—from Atlanta, he began by talking about how MLB had been in discussions with players and the union about the matter. That’s all you need to know. The owners threw the Atlanta Braves and the city’s baseball fans under the bus because the overwhelmingly woke union leaders demanded virtue-signaling in support of the dishonest progressive campaign to declare the recently passed Georgia election reforms “racist.” It has nothing to do with baseball making a principled stand against, in President Biden’s inexcusable lie, “Jim Crow on steroids.” It has nothing to do with voting, or race, or principles of any kind.
With the union demanding fealty to the Left and capitulation to anti-democratic propaganda, Manfred and the owners had to choose between a mass boycott of the game by players that would over-shadow the game itself after a season when there was no All-Star Game at all, a resulting escalation in hostility between the players’ union and the owners as dangerous negotiations were looming, and being called racists by the President, unscrupulous race-hucksters and lying pundits, or, in the alternative, just moving the game out of Georgia while pretending it was “the right thing to do.”
If you’re a weenie, or an American business in 2021 (but I repeat myself) without concern for values, truth, democracy or anything but profit (and now I’m being redundant), there is no other choice. Facts Don’t Matter. The public doesn’t matter. Democracy doesn’t matter. Letting Big Lies work doesn’t matter. The bottom line matters.
I couldn’t care less where the All-Star game is played, and neither do most baseball fans. Most baseball fans don’t even care much about the game itself any more. Once, the All-Star Game was a chance to see the two leagues, which were separate, test which had the better players. Ever since interleague play was added to the schedule, this point of interest has been lost. Once, players approached the game as a matter of pride and they played to win, most infamously when Pete Rose scored a winning run by flattening American League catcher Ray Fosse. Now they seldom even slide hard or dive for balls: the main motivation is not to get hurt. The original All-Star game was designed to add money to the players’ pension fund. Now, all the players are all millionaires, with the best pension plan in the world. Managers don’t manage the game to win either: their main objective is to make sure everyone on the rosters gets into the game, which makes the whole exhibition feel like a particularly long parade.
The All-Star game is a relic that only serves to remind older fans what has been lost over the years. It should be euthanized.
And non-baseball fans, which is the majority of the public? Baseball pulling the game from Atlanta has more news interest to them than the game itself, which has none. They think it proves that MLB rejects white supremacy and supports “Black Lives Matter.” They think this because it hasn’t yet sunk in the President Biden is lying about the Georgia law, and because they don’t possess the initiative and civic responsibility to read it. Here’s Biden:
- “What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick … deciding that you’re going to end voting at 5 o’clock when working people are just getting off work.” (March 25)
- “Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” (March 26)
- “You are going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock when working people just get off. This is all about keeping working folks and ordinary folks that I grew up with from being able to vote.” (March 31)
All a lie, the same lie, and a lie that has been pointed out repeatedly. Then on baseball’s Opening Day, Biden’s paid liar Jen Pataki again repeated that the law “standardizes the ending of voting every day at 5, right?”
What MLB should have done, if it cared about such small matters as integrity, abuse of power, abuse of influence, and the right of the public to decide their own states’ policies within the law, was to affirm that baseball has no business attempting to influence public policy whatsoever, in Georgia or anywhere else, and would not be threatened, pressured or bullied into doing so. These are, however weak and venal people who would literally consign their nation and their fans to Hell if they thought there was sufficient profit in it. That has pretty much been a constant in this professional sport and the rest of them as well.
For those who know this, the decision to pull the 2021 All-Star Game should be seen as little more than the Julie Principle in action. “Fish gotta swim and birds ‘gotta fly,” and professional sports teams will go wherever the money is, as they always have and always will. It’s worth finding contemptible, but since it is also inevitable, it is not worth getting too upset about it.
Oh…had you read about this? The Red Sox, my team, recently added NBA god Lebron James, race-baiter and loud-mouth supreme, to its ownership group.
Ethics Alarms 
It’s worth finding contemptible, but since it is also inevitable, it is not worth getting too upset about it.
Major League Baseball is also not worth watching.
Hopefully, this will bite them the same way that similar woke nonsense has for the NFL and NBA…loss of fans and revenue.
NB: The Atlanta Braves no longer play in Atlanta, nor even in a county infested by the city.
While this is technically true, it’s misleading. The new stadium is very much considered Atlanta, it’s just not in the city proper. Unfortunately Turner Stadium was located in an area which was very unsafe and lets just say problematic for those going to games. Urban sprawl, the new stadium is very much still in Atlanta by local standards.
This is my understanding as well, Tracy.
Having lived in the area for nearly 50 years, I would disagree. It’s true that many people living in the metro area will say “Atlanta”, for ease of communication, if asked where they live, but then clarify if the situation warrants…This happens near any major city.
The impetus for moving the stadium was not merely to put it in a better area, but because studies indicated that the demographics and customer base of attendees mapped as a triangle spreading to the north of the city. The deal to move was made with Cobb county, in secret, with no input from Atlanta or Fulton county. Not a square foot of the city of Atlanta exists in Cobb, due to legal impediments established by the county long ago to prevent the city from any annexation to expand its limits in that direction.
Not sure which “locals” would still place it in Atlanta, except perhaps some of those stuck in the city limits and comforted by such a conceit, but the participating fan base knows it’s elsewhere.
Are you sure you’re not ready to give up on baseball yet, Jack?
There’s the game, the teams, the players, my team, and the management. I gave up on management decades ago, when they allowed Barry Bonds to keep playing knowing he was cheating.
Just like the Coca Cola CEO popped off. Just as Hollywood flipped out on non-conforming states a few years ago — the oligarchs are speaking, you uneducated rubes who still think we live in a federal system better shut up and fall in line.
The insanely irresponsible – words do not exist to express how beyond the pale this is — upcoming spending bill will, as most of them do, go to large corporations. The same corporations who are entirely in bed with the Democrat party and who siphon a lot of that money into the pockets of Democrats. The same corporations and multi-billionaire elites who control pop culture and “science” and big education…the ones who are using extra-governmental power to undermine the bill of Rights and outflank the constitutional order.
If anyone wants to now how a proto-fascist state begins…this is it.
Congrats base Democrats – you elected a nascent fascist regime to ….let me check… get rid of the real danger…
Wow.
Slow clap guys.
The same corporations that, just a few years ago, were evil lobbying entities that didn’t deserve the same rights as people and had a dangerous influence over Congressional legislation and regulation and couldn’t be trusted to have the best interests of ordinary people at heart.
Yep, those same corporations are now being looked to in order to curb the Constitutional rights of individuals and influence local legislation on issues that don’t affect them so that the Democrats can smugly pronounce that only the government can violate individual liberties.
Amusingly, the trope, which has been wrong for decades, is that the GOP and Big Business have been the evil conniving partners, and that trope serves big business and Democrats well given the truth.
When Republicans have power, out comes the trope to bash the GOP (without actually doing anything about Big Business being in bed with big government).
No, not the same corporations, just the corporations that donated to Republicans. When those businesses donated to Democrats, it was OK. Democrats most likely had sleazier ways for those businesses to donate. How many donated to the Clinton charity only to stop immediately after she lost the election? Why is there no good account of the finances of that charity? What about all the money missing from Haiti relief?
No, they were never against corporate money, they were against corporate money to Republicans.
I’ve been reading that MLB is becoming closer and closer to China, a la the NBA. How many people get to vote in China? Just asking.
As an 40+ year fan of the Atlanta Braves (going back to the early years of Dale Murphy, Bob Horner, and Brett Butler), it is still only a mildly bitter disappointment to see the game moved. As Jack wrote, the All-Star game is a shadow of its former self. The now-incessant need to make sure every player gets in the game is nothing more than cheap imitation of the left-wing agenda, where every player that is selected to an All-Star team (equality of opportunity) must see at least one-half inning of play (equality of outcome).
If some player, probably already secure in the thought of the massive payday that is coming at the end of each and every week of the season, doesn’t take the field, there are often cries of outrage about the coach’s favoritism, his agenda against the player, and in all likelihood, the now-boring and overused-to-the-point-of-meaningless accusation of racism…because everything we don’t agree with – including the fact that Kirby Yates (the fifth closer on the team) did not face a batter – is racist.
Cynical John mentioned the China links and yes, those ties, in any sport, are totally disgusting. No one in America – where we all have the most opportunity to participate in the election process – is in any real position to complain about ANY kind of voter suppression, real or imagined, and then turn around and support sports organizations that support the Chinese, where suppression, oppression, and outright persecution are the order of the day. That is blatant hypocrisy, and it’s a shame that Atlanta’s management couldn’t stand up and add that to their statement of immense disappointment.
What I would love to see is the Atlanta Braves give MLB the middle finger and do the following: As a team, announce that none of them will accept an invitation to the All-Star game (even though several players have all-star-appearance bonuses built into their contracts). Instead, they will take that night and play their own all-star game in Buckhead…an exhibition game with a minor-league or local high-school team. And everything’s two dollars – tickets, hot dogs, nachos, beer, everything.
I’m pretty sure that isn’t possible, but I can dream of somebody with some pull (like a major-league baseball team) telling the Left to cram it where the sun doesn’t shine.
Whew!! That felt a little better to get of my chest…
“Joel Mundt”? Don’t you know that using the term munt is racist? It’s almost like the usual effect of teaching schoolboys the use of a Kundt’s tube.
Why has no one asked for proof of voter suppression? Where are all these people who are being disenfranchised? Why is voter suppression allegations taken as fact but allegations of voter fraud require proof. Seems to me we could identify all those people that have no ID because apparently the activists know who they are.
We should demand that all those that believe they will be disenfranchised by the Georgia law at the heart of this matter show up at Truist Park on the day of the All Star game and prove that they will be disenfranchised by the law.
Why the hell are we not demanding proof for their allegations. If we don’t demand proof it will become established as fact.
I say rescind all the tax breaks any professional sports team receives. Withdraw all municipal revenue for these stadiums and venues. Tax the owners and the players at 98% of all salaries and benefits received.
Impose embargos of paraphernalia and collectibles manufactured overseas. The list is endless, but if they want to play against America, America should pla against them.
We’ll see if GOP threats to take out baseball’s anomalous anti-trust immunity has any teeth. That should have been done decades ago anyway.
I pretty much gave up on sports years ago. I never was too much of a fan of organized sports leagues after seeing the corruption they caused in high school. I watched teachers give fake grades to athletes and watched teachers get (and coaches) disciplined for refusing to give fake grades. I watched athletes harass and abuse other students, immune to punishment because of sports. Even as early as 6th grade, I saw the coaches recruit the bigger 6th graders and get them to workout with the Jr. High athletes (and give them steroids). When I got to college, it was obviously worse, with sports being a business and the concept of the ‘student-athlete’ just a myth.
As I got older, I watched and saw deeper corruption, with fraudulent grades and degrees, illicitly paid ‘student-athletes’ in every major college sports program I looked at and sexual exploitation in many. Then came the way sports physically abused athletes, often minors. I had students telling me of multiple concussions in a single game, being pressured to play injured, etc. when they were in high school. While observing this, the supposed benefits of sports were ‘leadership’ and ‘character’. Well, what type of leadership and character participate in everything above?
Nothing that has come out lately has done anything but convince me that my earlier impression of organized sports leagues. When I look at the Michigan State gymnastics scandal and I find out that parents WATCHED their daughters get sexually abused in front of them and they said nothing because being in the program was too important, do you think that is going to make me change my mind?
So, am I going to tune out MLB? I did long ago. I also tuned out the NFL and the NBA My son used to watch pro basketball, but last year he got tired of watching BLM v. BLM. You couldn’t even tell what teams were playing because they were all ‘TEAM BLM’. The fact that all 3 leagues are anti-American and pro-Chinese doesn’t endear me to them more.