Let’s get a few things out of the way:
- Voting is good. More people participating in their governance is a good thing. Arbitrarily restricting people’s access to voting is bad.
- Even with the recent passage of the law in question, it is easier to vote in Georgia than it is in many states, including many states that tend to vote for Democrats.
- A lot of people are telling a lot of falsehoods about a lot of different things right now.
Stuart’s going to cover more of this side of the matter in a post tomorrow morning (or later tonight, depending how fired up Fargo is circa 10:00 PM Texas Time), but I didn’t want it to go unacknowledged. The issue of Georgia’s election changes is more complex than most are making it out to be (though, spoiler alert: very few are handling it honestly or forthrightly or patriotically or otherwise morally well).
Now.
The Major League Baseball side of it.
This, of course, is a marketing move, because everything is a marketing move. Major League Baseball believed it would be better served taking an explicit stand in one direction than taking an implicit stand in the other. Will the calculus work? I don’t know. My guess is that in a few years, it won’t have mattered much either way, and that people who like baseball will come back to the sport even if they “boycott” it and people who dislike baseball will fall away from the sport even if they briefly jump on board in support of this maneuver. There will be grandstanding. Lots of people will get upset. The grudges will gradually fade. You can’t boycott everything, and you can’t support everything, and eventually none of your friends care (few did to begin with), so you’re just putting on a performance for yourself. I could be wrong on this. I could be very wrong on this. But that’s my read on whether the act of moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta will help or hurt Major League Baseball.
That said.
Major League Baseball has an opportunity here. It has three months to put together a memorable, unique, inspiring All-Star Game. And the venue for that All-Star Game should be Kansas City, home of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
It was just in December that MLB recognized the Negro Leagues as official “major leagues,” meaning statistics from those leagues are now in MLB record books. It’s a nominal distinction in some ways and a meaningful one in the other, but the bottom line is that the Negro Leagues are receiving overdue recognition for their level of competition.
The level of competition is not the only thing for which MLB should recognize the Negro Leagues, though. And while I recognize MLB has recognized other aspects before, they’ve never gone as far as they could this year in publicly appreciating the contributions the Negro Leagues made to the game of baseball and to the United States of America as a nation. Play the game in Kansas City. Use it as a stage for the Civic Alliance (the nonpartisan coalition of businesses seeking to boost voter turnout, of which MLB is a part). But also use it as a stage for the Negro Leagues. Dress the players in the Negro League throwbacks. Honor the greatest Negro League players and teams throughout the week. Honor the historic significance of the Negro Leagues within American communities and within American history. And rather than National League vs. American League, make the game East vs. West, the way the Negro Leagues’ East-West All-Star Game was.
It’s important, obviously, to not do this in a tokenizing way. It’s important, too, to do this in a positive way, and to work to bring fans in who might say that pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia wasn’t the right move. But if Major League Baseball is looking to showcase its commitment to pushing back against discrimination (as is the seeming motivation for moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in the first place), this is a way to do it, and while there are reasonable arguments to be made criticizing Major League Baseball’s move (for example, one could viably argue Major League Baseball hasn’t taken as strong a stance against currently-committing-genocide China as they have against Georgia), there aren’t reasonable arguments to be made criticizing honoring the Negro Leagues and supporting voting rights. To criticize doing that, you pretty much have to fall back on racism (and yes, I’m aware that many will, and won’t even know they’re doing it).
