Ga. loses All-Star Game over voting law
Manfred says move shows values; no new host city named
Major League Baseball sent a warning shot Friday to Republicans considering new restrictions on voting laws, pulling its summer All-Star Game out of 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 relocation of the game because of the new voting law that he and civil rights groups predicted will have an outsize impact on people of color.
In a statement, 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.”
Baseball said it was finalizing details about new locations for this year’s All-Star Game and the 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 MLB, publicly opposed the Georgia bill during the weeks it was moving through the state Legislature. Delta and Coca-Cola, both based in Georgia, declined to take a position on the legislation; since its passage, both have issued strongly worded statements. The lack of a concerted effort by companies to stop the Georgia bill before passage now looms as an object lesson for business and sports in other states; in Texas, American Airlines and Dell have denounced the bill moving in the Legislature. Republicans have shrugged off that criticism so far.
Kemp, who has been forcefully defending the law in multiple television appearances this week, criticized the decision to move the All-Star Game and tried to pin the blame on state Democrats for their vocal criticism of the voting restrictions.
“Today, Major League Baseball caved to fear, political opportunism, and liberal lies,” Kemp said in a statement, calling out Biden and Stacey Abrams, the titular head of the state’s Democrats. He continued: “I will not back down. Georgians will not be bullied. We will continue to stand up for secure, accessible, fair elections.”
Georgia Democrats had not called for a boycott of the game but were building pressure on MLB and other Georgia-based corporations to oppose the state’s new voting law.
Abrams, who ran against Kemp for governor in 2018 and may challenge him again next year, said Friday that she is “disappointed” baseball pulled its All-Star Game but said she is “proud of their stance on voting rights.”
For now, the fallout from baseball’s decision is more political and civic than financial. The impact on the Georgia economy of losing the All-Star Game is minimal, said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College, because most of the tickets would be sold locally and many of the typical festivities would likely be canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.