Take me out to the ballgame! NOT!
Baseball used to be semi-sacred in my life. Years ago, I was surprised at how challenging it was to explain the game of baseball to an adult friend who had never played nor really watched the sport (yes, such people do exist).
“Well, the guy standing on the mound in the center of the diamond, called the pitcher, throws the baseball towards the bottom of the diamond, known as home plate,” I said, feeling kind of sheepish because it was so difficult to find the right descriptive words. “The batter tries to strike the ball with his bat. And if he manages to hit the ball between those two lines, known as the foul lines, then he runs towards first base (pointing to it) and tries to arrive before the other team gets him out.”
“Huh? Why would he not want to get out?”
Hence, the first lesson in baseball began. Of course, like with any game of value, there’s no way the intricacies, nuances and strategy of baseball itself could ever be relayed in a single short session. It takes a lifetime of study to truly grasp a lot of it, and even then, there’s always something to discover that you didn’t realize before. I still struggle to understand the “infield fly rule” and the dropped third strike rule, for example. Why is a “balk” called? How to teach if you don’t get it yourself?
But never in all of my experience with America’s pastime did I sense a connection between baseball and politics. Yet our esteemed new president, sometimes known as senile Joe Biden felt compelled to drag his warped conception of contemporary racism into the sport last week.
Floridian and longtime baseball fan Larry Thornberry wrote at The American Spectator:
“Democrats have now enlisted baseball in their lunatic campaign to paint any effort to prevent voter fraud as racist and a return to Jim Crow, a vicious fellow whom decent Americans ran out of town decades ago. Only a few cranks and shut-ins want him back. They won’t get him.
“The latest target is Georgia’s recent and reasonable voter reform law, which Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law [last] Thursday. Democrats have claimed that it’s ‘voter suppression’ and will prevent black Georgians from voting. It won’t, and the cynics making these claims know it won’t. Nor would the other proposed voter reform laws being considered by other states prevent any legitimate voter from casting a ballot.
“’It’s Jim Crow on steroids,’ our stumbling, bumbling president has declared of the new Georgia law. It isn’t, of course. This over-the-top claim is hyperbole on steroids. Joe Biden knows this. He’s not a complete nitwit, though he often plays one on TV.”
Thornberry later conceded that senile Joe is indeed a nitwit, so at least that question was resolved. Biden joined an effort by a group of professional baseball dignitaries (most notably LA Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who guided his team to last year’s world series title) to force the league to remove this year’s All-Star Game from Georgia as a consequence of passing a law which, according to the liberal squawkers, suppresses African-American voting rights.
Major League Baseball announced the game will be moved. The woke crowd forced another corporate capitulation! Cancel! Cancel! Cancel!
As everyone’s likely heard by now, the law merely requires a valid ID to request or cast a ballot, a concept that wasn’t considered all that controversial until leftists like Obama AG Eric Holder began pounding the racism angle a decade or so ago. It’s curious how these opportunists are okay with the notion of demanding ID and a “vaccine passport” to show your face in public, but they’re so against requiring it at the voting booth.
If not for hypocrisy, liberals have nothing at all. Now they’ve ruined baseball because its governors dared to (likely years ago) grant its annual All-Star classic to the Peach State, home of 16 Joe Biden 2020 electoral votes and two ultra-leftist Democrat senators. At least for now.
Perhaps the wound is raw because baseball has a long history of overt racism, denying black players the privilege of playing in the major leagues because they were deemed inferior. Yes, baseball was a relic of the true Jim Crow era, and it’s difficult to hear retold stories of what Jackie Robinson (the first black player to break the color barrier 74 years-ago on April 15th) endured from opposing fans and players alike. Those were sad times. It makes one’s ears sting to listen to the epithets and threats.
The tale has a happy ending, however, as today baseball is fully integrated at all levels, where white boys from the Midwest play alongside those with all sorts of divergent DNA from every part of North, South and Central America and increasingly, Australia and Asia. Major League baseball has so many players from the Dominican Republic that the small island nation’s national team (during the Olympics) is often regarded as one of those contending for the gold medal. The same goes for Cuba, though most Cuban standouts aren’t permitted to leave their country by their communist rulers.
If anything, baseball is probably the most integrated sport there is (except for soccer). Professional hockey has tons of European players skating in the NHL, but so-called “racial diversity” is sorely lacking. Russians and Swedes look just as pale as French Canadians.
By singling out Georgia’s new voter reform law, Biden and others of his ilk created a problem where there isn’t one. As Thornberry pointed out in his piece, the All-Star game was slated to be played in Atlanta, a place where a heavy concentration of African-Americans lives and works. Removing the game from their neighborhood will deprive the locals of economic opportunities that the occasion brings. Will it really help a political cause to “cancel” people’s livelihoods?
It’s also interesting to recall that Georgia was similarly targeted by the leftist Hollywood clique in recent years over the abortion issue. Another boycott? Say it isn’t so! The brainless jackasses are doing it again!
Beneath it all, Biden and Democrats are terrified that if they don’t keep up the “systemic racism” ruse that they’ll lose momentum to ditch the senate filibuster. Barack Obama first tied the longstanding upper chamber tradition to Jim Crow last year at the late John Lewis’s funeral (in Atlanta, Georgia, no less; making a political speech at a wake is a Democrat tradition in itself). Empty-headed dunce Biden plagiarized the “Big O’s” thinking at his first-of-its-kind press conference a couple weeks ago.
The 60-vote filibuster threshold is all that stands in the way of Democrats using party-line votes to completely transform America in the span of a few months. First they’d pass the voter integrity and privacy stealing H.R. 1/S.R. 1 combo, then they’d move on to dumbo Joe’s “infrastructure” package, which is five percent improvements for roads and bridges and a majority of federal subsidies for “green energy” to combat “climate change.”
What about the badly mis-labeled “Equality Act” which would enshrine the LGBTQ agenda into national law? Former Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall wrote:
“The Equality Act has already passed the House of Representatives and is now before the U. S. Senate. It is of the utmost urgency for each of us to call, write or email our two U. S. Senators immediately and respectfully demand they oppose the Equality Act. It is important tell them we do not want them to authorize schools to lie to parents regarding transgender policies; nor to remove conscience protections from American citizens who oppose killing innocent children, or the sick or elderly; nor to force them into LGBTQ+ transgender re-education classes as a condition of employment.”
It’s also important for fans to let their hometown major league baseball team know that they won’t stand for -- or patronize -- a “business” that involves itself with political matters that are best left outside the ballpark. The last thing anyone wants is for morons like Joe Biden to ruin another aspect of American life by connecting the game to the false concept of “systemic racism”.
Try explaining this to someone who doesn’t have a clue about baseball -- or politics -- or life.
Major League Baseball
All-Star Game
Dave Roberts
Georgia Voter integrity law
boycotts
Joe Biden
Jim Crow laws
Jackie Robinson
Equality Act
H.R. 1/S.R. 1
Infrastructure
filibuster