MLB All-Star Game pulled from Ga. due to voting law
Major League Baseball sent a warning shot on Friday to Republicans considering new restrictions on voting laws, pulling its summer All-Star Game out of suburban Atlanta in a rebuke to Georgia’s new election restrictions that will make it harder to vote in the state’s urban areas.
The decision by the baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred, came after days of pressure from civil rights groups and discussions with stakeholders like the Major League Baseball Players Association. The action is likely to put additional pressure on other leading organizations and corporations to consider pulling business out of
Georgia, a move that both Republicans and Democrats in the state oppose despite fiercely disagreeing about the new voting law.
Baseball’s decision comes as other states are moving closer to passing new laws that would further restrict voting. In Texas, home to two professional baseball teams, the State Senate passed a law this week that would limit early voting hours, ban drive-thru voting, add restrictions to absentee voting and make it illegal for local election officials to mail absentee ballot applications to voters, even if they qualify. In Florida, also home to two major league teams, the State Legislature has introduced a bill that would severely limit drop boxes.
The law in Georgia, signed last week by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, was the first passed in a battleground state that brought a host of new restrictions to voting since the 2020 election. It added new identification requirements for absentee voting, limited the use of drop boxes, granted more authority over elections to the Legislature, and made it a misdemeanor for some groups to offer food or water to voters waiting in line.
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden joined a growing call for the game’s relocation because he and civil rights groups predicted the new law will have an outsize impact on people of color.
In a statement, Mr. Manfred said that after conversations with teams, players, former stars and players union officials he had concluded that “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.”
The league faced the unsettling prospect of celebrating an All-Star week dedicated to former Atlanta Braves great Henry Aaron, a Black baseball pioneer who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, against the backdrop of a Georgia elections overhaul widely seen as targeting Black voters.
Few major companies or groups, including Major League Baseball, publicly opposed the bill as it moved through the state Legislature. Delta and Coca-Cola, both based in Georgia, declined to take a position on it; since its passage, both have issued strongly worded statements.
The Braves franchise, which left downtown Atlanta for a new publicly funded stadium in suburban Cobb County in 2017, said in a statement that it is “deeply disappointed” in the decision.
Tony Clark, the players union executive director, has said the union was willing to discuss pulling the game, scheduled for July 13.