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On Friday, Major League Baseball announced that it’s moving the 2021 All-Star Game and the 2021 MLB Draft out of Georgia, in response to the state’s new voting law, SB 202. In a statement, Commissioner Rob Manfred said, “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box. Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.”
The Atlanta Braves, who would have hosted the All-Star Game, responded with a snippy statement of their own, saying that while the “organization will continue to stress the importance of equal voting opportunities […] Unfortunately, businesses, employees, and fans in Georgia are the victims of this decision.”
For MLB, playing the 2021 All-Star Game in Georgia just wasn t worth the hassle
play
What prompted MLB s decision to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta? (1:42)
Howard Bryant joins Outside the Lines to discuss MLB pulling its All-Star Game from Atlanta. (1:42)
Author of The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron
Author of Juicing the Game
Revenge and backlash have always been the American response to defeat, especially in the case of civil rights. Despite the resulting muddiness, misdirection and outrage, the Georgia voting bill, signed into law last month,
was clearly a response to defeat, just as the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was. Sports have always been expected to provide a form of talcum to assuage the effects of backlash, the illusion that the games reflect a certain national unity through its diversions the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the World Series. My team, your team, our country.
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The Big Lie has been replaced by 50 little lies nestling in 50 different states. The Big Lie, of course, is that if only the presidential election hadn’t been stolen, then Trump would still be in office. That’s now playing out in statehouses around the country, with legislation aiming to suppress, primarily, Black voters.
April 5, 2021
I come here not to bury MLB, and not really to praise it, but to wonder what else it could have done. On Friday, the league announced that it would be pulling this summer’s All-Star Game from Atlanta in the wake of Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature passing a law that would, among other things, impose burdensome new ID requirements on voters, limit absentee voting, and give the legislature wide latitude to intervene on state and county election boards. It was a move both correct and frustratingly limited, a multi-billion-dollar enterprise both doing the least and also the most it realistically could in the moment.