Sports steps up role as activist in hottest issues
Baseball’s All-Star game shift latest social movement stand
For major American sports leagues that long have taken pains to stay out of divisive issues around race and social activism, the past few years have seen a remarkable awakening.
Top leagues and their multimillionaire stars have come out forcefully and publicly against police brutality and gun violence, and just as strongly in support of LGBTQ causes and the right of their players to kneel during the national anthem. Players have spoken at protest marches, and leagues have bankrolled new social justice
efforts. In Georgia, a professional women’s basketball team actively campaigned against its owner, a sitting Republican senator, before last year’s November elections, and in doing so helped flip control of the chamber to Democrats.
Still, it was striking when, after days of mounting pressure, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced Friday that the league would pull the 2021 All-Star Game out of suburban Atlanta in a rebuke of a new Georgia voting law that critics have predicted would disenfranchise Black voters.
Relocating the game — an expensive logistical hassle, and a move that even baseball’s players did not universally support — was a watershed moment for a sport long known more for its traditionalism and aversion to risk.
Baseball, which until 1947 barred Black players from its teams, was drawn into American sports activism through pioneering figures like Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente. But more recently, it was also a sport that balked at calls to move the 2011 AllStar Game out of Arizona over a contentious immigration law, and stood aside as one of its franchises defended an insensitive team name and another allowed its fans to continue using a chant widely viewed as racist.
Baseball was the last of the major U.S. sports leagues to acknowledge the killing of George Floyd last year — waiting a full nine days. But it embraced the Black Lives Matter movement when it returned to the field last summer, and by the fall it had volunteered its shuttered stadiums as early voting sites.
Aaron celebration
The All-Star Game and its week of festivities were set
to include celebrations of the legacy of Hall of Fame slugger Hank Aaron, a civil rights icon who died earlier this year. But by Friday, Manfred said, he had concluded that moving the game and baseball’s annual draft out of Georgia were “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.”
Over the past five years, sports has embraced an activism that has quietly revealed a power shift from the rich, mostly white men who run them to the notquite-as-rich, mostly nonwhite athletes who compete in them.
Activism’s arrival in sports is not new, of course. From baseball’s Robinson to boxing’s Muhammad Ali to football’s Colin Kaepernick to soccer’s Megan Rapinoe, athletes have long pressed social justice causes important to them and their communities. But the breadth and the public nature of the efforts over the past year, as social justice protests swept the nation on the eve of a presidential election, have shown the willingness of leagues, teams and athletes to engage in debates and take positions they had often avoided.
Sometimes the shift was
done reluctantly, the result of national politics or changing public opinion. Sometimes teams and leagues were prodded to act by their own players. But Friday showed once again that sports isn’t simply entertainment in a vacuum.
“Throughout the year, there’s been a lot of things going on not only with the pandemic but as a society,” Alex Cora, the Boston Red Sox manager, told reporters Friday. “They moved it for the right reasons.”
Kaepernick role
It was only five years ago that Kaepernick’s decision to quietly kneel during the national anthem to protest systemic racism and police brutality sparked stiff disapproval from some team owners and criticism from a strident part of the white fan base. But eventually, even NFL owners like the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, who once ordered his players not to kneel during the national anthem, were joining them in the gesture on the sidelines.
And players, aware that their wealth and their stature gave them a valuable megaphone aided by social media, kept pressing. After
Jacob Blake, a Black man, was left paralyzed by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take part in a playoff game in August in Orlando, Florida. Within hours, dozens of other teams in other leagues had joined the work stoppage. Within days, the basketball players emerged from a meeting with NBA officials with new commitments that it would join their fight against social injustice.
Some players went beyond causes to overtly political acts like campaigning for specific candidates. In the WNBA, players on the Atlanta Dream became so infuriated by the statements by the team’s coowner, Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, about the Black Lives Matter movement that they actively campaigned for her opponent, Raphael Warnock, wearing T-shirts with his name onto the court. Loeffler lost the election, sweeping not just her opponent but also another Democrat running in the state to victory.
The two victories gave Democrats, under President Joe Biden, control of the nation’s legislative agenda, and the momentum
to push for some of the progressive causes the players held dear.
Unique action
There were many factors, though, that made MLB’s action Friday unique. While major league club owners are no different than their counterparts in professional basketball or football in being a largely Republican donor set, the demographics on the field are starkly different. The sport’s fan base is older and less racially diverse than basketball’s and football’s. The majority of major league players are white, and many trend conservative in their personal politics. (Roughly 30% of MLB players are Latino, most of them from outside the United States; only 8% are Black.)
For baseball, the groundswell against its hosting the All-Star Game in July at the Atlanta Braves’ stadium, Truist Park, grew as Manfred worked the phones this past week. As political activists and important corporate partners of the Braves like Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola spoke out against the voting law, Manfred held conversations with team owners and the players’ union and current and former players, but he didn’t require a formal vote of approval for his decision. In fact, the union hadn’t yet finished canvassing players when Manfred made his announcement.
Some players, such as Braves star Freddie Freeman, advocated in recent days for the game to stay in Atlanta, so it could serve as a platform for a discussion about voting rights.
Braves upset
In a rare public rebuke of MLB by a team, the Braves said they were “deeply disappointed” by Manfred’s announcement that he would move the game, and called businesses, employees and fans in Georgia “victims” of his decision.
Other teams, though, stood just as strongly behind Manfred.