Manfred an All-Star for move out of Ga.
Honoring Aaron in place with awful vote law would’ve been an error
Major League Baseball has done the right thing by moving the 2021 AllStar Game out of Atlanta as a protest against a new Georgia law that was clearly written to suppress minority voters in that state, and built on the outrageous lie that Georgia was stolen from Donald J. Trump in the last presidential election, and so were two Senate seats previously held by two Republicans.
So baseball now moves the All-Star Game to Coors Field, in Denver, and now there is a new lie being told in the bullhorn media that Colorado’s election laws are the same as the new ones in Georgia. There is no need to go too deep into the weeds on this, but start here: Colorado, unlike Georgia, sends out mail-in ballots to every active registered voter in the state.
And Colorado will have exponentially more drop-boxes than Georgia will have under SB 202. There are more differences than that. But the what-about-ism dealing with other states is a head fake in this discussion. If you don’t think Georgia put this law in place to make it harder for people of color to vote in future elections, than you also believe that pigs can fly.
Now baseball has done something in reaction to that. There are statements in America about race-based issues like these. Athletes and leagues make statements all the time. The statements are part of the noble history of dissent in this country. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, 53 years ago, the Olympics in Mexico City, made an eloquent statement on the medal stand with black-gloved fists in the name of Black Power. That’s what it was called then. It is called Black Lives Matter now. But one thing has not changed, in sports or anywhere
else in America, in the more than half-century since they did that:
Race is still the third rail in this country, and always has been and always will be. People are outraged that Rob Manfred, the baseball Commissioner, would take a stance like this involving the city where the great Henry Aaron played, and where he passed Babe Ruth in April of 1974 when he hit his 715th home run. But please don’t be so sure how Mr. Aaron would have weighed in on this controversy, whether he lived in Atlanta or not.
I was lucky enough to speak to him on the phone every few months before he passed away.
In one of them, I asked about the Black Lives Matter protests he was witnessing across the country. And this is what Aaron, as much the conscience of baseball as anyone, said to me that day:
“I’m not able to move around much anymore. But if I could, I’d be out there marching. I’d be right there at the front of the line.”
Manfred was at the front of the line on this, despite all the fire he has taken. He did the right thing. He is on the right side of this. He didn’t tell the people who run The Masters what they should do about SB 202. That is not his job. It is not his job to decide right now how he would handle a similar moment like this in the future. He did what he did in this moment. He didn’t hide from this. You may have problems with other decisions he has made since he succeeded Bud Selig and became the 10th commissioner the sport has ever seen. Have at him on those. But he absolutely put baseball on the right side of this.
There was nothing wrong with the kinds of Black Lives Matter slogans we saw on NBA uniforms last year when the playoffs were held in that bubble in Orlando. Those were fine statements. So were all the images of players and coaches kneeling and linking arms. Also fine statements.
But what Manfred and Major League Baseball have done here is offer a real protest in sports. This is not to diminish political statements, because we’re going to see more of those and not fewer in sports as we go forward. Sports keep evolving in its reaction to them. If Colin Kaepernick took a knee today, you hope that he would not pay with his career. It is the Georgia legislature and governor who regress.
This is part of what the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, has said about baseball’s decision:
“Just as elections have consequences, so do the actions of those who are elected. Unfortunately, the removal of the MLB All Star game from GA is likely the 1st of many dominoes to fall,