MANFRED PLAYS HARDBALL
MLB PULLS ALL-STAR GAME FROM ATLANTA TO PROTEST NEW GA. VOTER LAW
Baseball is yanking this year’s All-Star Game and draft out of Georgia after the state’s Republicans rammed through a bill making it harder to vote.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced the decision on Friday.
“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” Manfred said in a statement.
Georgia Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, immediately pushed back using phrases such as “cancel culture and woke political activists.”
“Major League Baseball caved to fear, political opportunism, and liberal lies,” Kemp said in a statement.
He blamed President Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams for the decision, even though Abrams said she opposed any boycott.
On Thursday, Biden said that he would “strongly” support moving the game over the law, which he called “Jim Crow on steroids.” Biden also said that the law “makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”
The law, signed into law by Kemp last week, was a blatant response to Biden winning Georgia last year and two Democratic senators winning the state in January. The fewer people who are able to vote, the better Republicans perform in elections, and so the party is pushing restrictive voter laws across the country to hang on to power. The restrictions target poor and Black people, who are largely seen as having delivered Democrats their key victories in the 2020 elections.
The bill makes it harder to vote absentee or by mail, and makes it a crime to give food and water to people waiting in line to vote.
“Disappointed MLB will move the All-Star Game, but proud of their stance on voting rights,” Abrams said on Friday.
The Braves complained about the news after it broke, saying they were “deeply disappointed.” The team, which fled Atlanta for nearby Cobb County for tax breaks in 2017, said that “Unfortunately, businesses, employees, and fans in
Georgia are the victims of this decision.”
Pressure had barely begun to build on Manfred and the league. Players’ union chief Tony Clark said last week that he would be “open” to moving the game, sentiments that were backed up by Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts.
The Players Alliance, a group of Black MLB players, said they supported the move in a statement.
Abrams, the voting rights activist who narrowly lost a disputed race for governor against Kemp in 2018, said earlier this week that she opposed any boycott. (Abrams and her organization Fair Fight played a large role increasing Georgia’s voter turnout for the 2020 elections.)
“As a Black person, a Southerner, and an American, I respect and defend the right to boycott,” she said on Wednesday night. “But the communities most targeted by SB 202 would be most hurt by a boycott of Georgia. Bring your business to Georgia and, if you’re already here, stay and fight.”
MLB has not yet said where the game and draft will actually be held. The game was scheduled for the Braves’ suburban Cobb County stadium on July 13, while the draft is scheduled for July 11-13.
“Just as elections have consequences, so do the actions of those who are elected,” Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said after the news broke on Friday. She called it “likely the first of many dominoes to fall, until the unnecessary barriers put in place to restrict access to the ballot box are removed.”
Leagues have moved All-Star games and other events in protest before, although MLB did not move its 2011 game from Phoenix after Arizona passed a controversial immigration law then.
The NCAA has a long-standing ban on playing championships in states with Confederate flags at their state capitols. The ban included South Carolina for years and currently only applies to Mississippi.
More similarly, the NBA pulled its All-Star Game out of Charlotte in 2017 after North Carolina passed a “bathroom bill” discriminating against transgender people.