There is little more perfect in the world, in this writer’s position, than baseball.
If the bases were 89 feet apart instead of 90 feet, the game would be infinitely different with more runners reaching base.
If the pitching mound were 62’ from home plate rather than 60’ 6,” pitches would break out of the strike zone and hitters would get just a nanosecond longer to look at them, leading to a drastic increase in offense.
Heck, you even get three opportunities, or strikes, at the plate to show you can hit the ball before you strike out, and even the best players in the game fail seven times out of ten to get a hit!
Being a fan of baseball at all levels has been a pleasure of my years on this planet, but moreso, I’ve been blessed to be a fan of the Atlanta Braves.
Being a Braves fan in South Dakota required digging through box scores and Baseball Weekly magazines as a youth to follow the team until we got cable on the farm and I could watch TBS and see Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz baffle hitters.
I was blessed with an opportunity to write about the game, full-time for a time, and I still write about the game part-time. I’ve turned down opportunities to scout in the game because I had a young family that I simply couldn’t leave behind to travel 3/4 of the year.
As my wife and I grew our family through foster care and adoption, we took a baseball trip each summer. Last summer was supposed to be a return trip to the College World Series in Omaha with the opportunity to cover the MLB draft. This summer was supposed to be the MLB All-Star Game in Atlanta. Then COVID hit. We scrapped those plans.
Even without those plans in place, I initially struggled with the decision by MLB to pull the All-Star festivities out of Atlanta. Prominent Georgia activists spoke to moving the game as a potential anchor point that those on the extreme right could use to appeal to their base, using the “everyone’s against us” mentality. Sure enough, that’s exactly what multiple people did, both in Georgia and out of Georgia.
The word was that MLB made a “political move” and that baseball should keep out of politics.
Strike one.
Veteran Atlanta-based reporter Howard Bryant, who has written one of the best books that exists about one of this year’s All-Star Game’s focus honorees, Hank Aaron, used his sources to find the real reasoning behind the move of the game.
Money.
Advertisers and corporate sponsors of the game went to the league and said that they’d pull their money out of the game if MLB did not move the game out of Georgia. MLB was left without the opportunity to really make a political statement. They responded to money.
Sure, the MLBPA (the players’ union) met to discuss playing in Atlanta, and there had been discussions between the MLBPA and MLB about Atlanta hosting the game, but from my own talks with player agents, no action had been suggested by MLBPA. Yet.
Still, the echo chamber remained that MLB needed to pick a place to move the game to without any voter restrictions or it’d be a hypocritical move. The fervor hit a high note when Denver was announced as the new location.
“Colorado ALSO has Voter ID laws!”
“Colorado offers LESS in-person voter days!”
Strike two.
While, to be frank, there isn’t a state that has voter access perfected, Colorado does a very, very good job. Colorado had the second-highest turnout in the 2020 election, and has done so by heavily utilizing mail-in balloting, something that was a focus of restrictions within the Georgia law.
Colorado mails every eligible voter a ballot, and with voter turnout reaching 75-80% of all eligible voters, more than 90% vote through mail-in balloting.
The ID laws that are in place in Colorado are also “soft ID” laws, which allow for a number of different types of photo ID, and even if an ID isn’t produced, a voter can vote via provisional ballot, allowing election officials to verify the voter’s identity.
Wait, we’re off topic, because this wasn’t even about politics in the first place.
Foul ball. Still strike two.
The falsehood that comes with anyone who says, “I don’t want politics involved with my (sports, theater, farm, school, etc.)” is that inherently politics is involved with all of it.
The decisions made by South Dakota’s legislators every spring affect every aspect of our daily lives. There were bills this session that had direct or indirect impact on every topic mentioned in those parenthesis, along with many more topics.
When those bills upset a company or an entity because they exclude or discriminate, it could mean that a theater show or a concert or the Summit League chooses to pull away from the state, costing the state money and jobs. That’s on top of the legal costs that you and I as taxpayers must fund for those bills when they inevitably lose to the ACLU for being discriminatory.
I love seeing new acts added to the State Fair billing list. I hope the names only get bigger and more prominent. It’d be an outright shame if a decision made in Pierre cost the State Fair a potentially-lucrative act from coming to the fair, but that is the business end of politics.
Politics hurting local business. Well, that sounds like strike three.
