Dropping the checkered flag on pro sports

There’s an old saying around the ballpark, and it goes like this: “Ballgame.”

It basically means “that’s the final out, the game is over and we’re done here.”

These days, I’m about ready to call “ballgame” on the whole sorry spectacle.

I am sick to death of athletes, teams and even entire leagues climbing into bed with bad actors for political purposes, and pushing for boycotts of certain things and places while ignoring fardirtier laundry in their own closets. They’re hypocrites, every darned one of them.

I do not say this lightly. I grew up as probably the biggest sports fan in the history of my little hometown, and one of the very few from that conservative land to call Muhammad Ali his favorite athlete. I’ve read Jim Bouton’s counter-culture baseball classic “Ball Four” cover to cover dozens of times, and the sight of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics still sends an awe-inspiring chill down my spine.

I respected the heck out of those people and many others like them. I still do. I always will.

On the other hand, I want to grab the likes of Rob Manfred and Adam Silver by the scruff of their necks and say “You’re evil, clueless, filthy-rich frauds posing as people who care. You don’t.”

Let’s start with baseball.

Major League Baseball — a sport I figured was too good to screw up, at least until the owners hired Manfred — has decided to move the AllStar Game out of Atlanta in protest of the state of Georgia adopting stricter election laws. Apparently a fair number of players (past and present) agreed, and joined several celebrities and politicians in supporting this move.

This is where we should ask the age-old question, “Who does this help, who does this hurt and what does it change?”

Let’s start with the “hurt.” This decision hurts the hell out of Atlanta-area businesses, which were expecting to reap a $100 million bonanza from hosting this potentially post-pandemic game. Instead, that windfall will land in … Denver.

More than 80 percent of Denver is White. More than half of Atlanta is Black.

So who does this hurt? Mainly Black people. Who does this help? Mainly White people. Major League Baseball has incredulously transferred almost $100 million in wealth from the very people they claimed to be helping.

Finally, what did it change? Absolutely nothing, other than driving away more of baseball’s already-dwindling fan base. The law is still on the books, and no nineinning game involving 40-plus millionaires is going to change that, regardless of where it’s played or how many times these fools pat themselves on the back.

Here’s a final level of ludicrousness: In ways, Colorado’s voter laws are even more restrictive than Georgia’s. The same can be said of New York and a good number of other states where they play major league baseball. But Denver gets the

All-Star Game, and Atlanta doesn’t, and the games continue all across the fruited plain, “restrictive voter laws” or not.

Meanwhile, following the footsteps of sports like the NBA and NFL, baseball’s TV ratings continue to plummet. Most of the players’ exorbitant salaries come from TV contracts. The people who hand over billions of dollars in those deals always figured it was worth it because so many people watched the games. Now, the neverending mix of sports and politics is driving viewers away in record numbers, which means networks probably won’t offer that much money next time around. Which can only lead to … smaller contracts.

Memo to pro athletes: Congratulations. You’ve killed the golden goose.

“But Mike!” you say. “They’re making a brave stand for what they believe in!”

Good for them. And in many cases, I believe the same things they believe. But if you’re making a stand with nothing to lose, how “brave” is that? For now, all of these people are making ridiculous amounts of money, even picking up endorsement deals along the way — unlike Ali, who had no contract, and lost his boxing license, and thus went flat broke as a social pariah while facing prison time for his principled stand in the late 1960s. THAT took guts.

Meanwhile, leagues and athletes are cuddling up to some of the most despicable regimes on the planet to keep that cash flow alive, all forms of atrocities be damned.

Case in point: Like LeBron James and the NBA before them, Major League Baseball has embraced China — signing a deal last week with tech company Tencent, one of the Communist Partybacked firms that briefly dropped NBA games in 2019 after former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey dared to voice support for prodemocracy protesters. MLB doesn’t care about human rights violations and neither did the NBA; they just want the money, and they’ll turn a blind eye to anything that might slow the flow. But hey! We got the All-Star Game moved out of Georgia!

(Meanwhile, it’s easier for people in Asia to watch American sports on TV than any of us poor saps who subscribed to Dish-TV hoping to watch Giants and A’s baseball.

But I digress.)

Bottom line, we’re left with this: We can no longer turn on a baseball game, or a basketball game, or a football game or any sport without the stench of divisive politics ruining the atmosphere. And the part that angers me is, it’s this way because people wanted it this way. There are those who want us at each other’s throats every possible minute of every day, and they’ve got to be spiking footballs in orgasmic delight at how well they’ve succeeded in spreading that hatred and division onto the athletic fields.

There was a time in my life when sports were an escape from this stuff — as it was for people of every race, creed, color and religion. If we were united anywhere, it was through our love of the games. For a few hours a week, we could set all of the partisan political BS aside and actually enjoy an activity as united citizens, with nothing more important to argue about than whether your team or mine was going to win — all while enjoying the camaraderie of our friends, Democrats and Republicans alike.

I fear those days are gone and they’re never coming back. And it stinks.

Ballgame.