Major League Baseball (MLB) is Infected by Ideology

Major League Baseball (MLB) is Infected by Ideology.

This has probably been happening for a long time but has gone largely unnoticed except perhaps by baseball scholars. Now even the casual observer can see that big business baseball has joined mega-business social media giants by injecting itself into the prevailing ideology when they moved the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to the Georgia legislature exercising its Constitutional rights. Georgia passed a controversial voting law that is widely claimed to restrict voter access.

Atlanta area employers including Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola signaled their disappointment about the new law but were condemned by Democrat activists as being too weak in their “disappointment.”

What the New Law Says

On the surface the law appears to limit voter fraud.  You be the judge about whether the law is unfair or not. You can download the entire text HERE (PDF).    Here it is on Document Cloud – https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20527915-sb-202-as-passed

The real question is whether BASEBALL, especially big-money corporate baseball, should be showing its middle finger to 50% of its fans.  Here again you be the judge.

Here Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp discusses the new law.

What Can You Do?

If you are disappointed that the game was moved, there are a few things you can do. None of them will make any difference unless everybody joins in, as in a majority.

1. Read the text of the law.  If you do not understand it all, as most people do not unless they re not trained lawyers, read an unbiased critique of the law.  Good luck trying to find that.  Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB)  seems to do a pretty good job: https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/03/27/what-does-georgias-new-voting-law-sb-202-do.

2. If you agree that the 2021 All-Star game should not have been moved out of Atlanta, let your voice be heard. Call or email:

• By Phone
  Customer Support toll-free number: 866-800-1275
  International callers: 972-836-1111
• By Email
  customerservice@website.mlb.com
• By Mail
  MLB Advanced Media, L.P.
  1271 Avenue of the Americas
  New York, NY 10020

Why Do We Care?

In the grand scheme of our Federal Republic, it is important to remember that a pure democracy is the worst kind of government.  You can argue that a dictatorship is worse than a democracy but a pure democracy will result in the dictatorship of the majority.

The founders knew this so the Constitution  was contrived to avoid this as much as possible.  The Constitution was designed to share power so no single entity, including a majority of citizens, can abuse the rights of a minority.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants the Congress seventeen “enumerated” powers, plus unspecified “implied” powers.  The “Commerce Clause” of Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to regulate  commerce among the states. Otherwise all powers not granted to Congress are reserved for the states or the people.

To further safeguard all citizens’ rights, they devised the electoral college and equal state representation in the Senate. Whether those can stand up to an emerging uninformed ideology remains to be seen.

Corporations are People Too

The Supreme Court affirmed that Corporations have certain free speech rights that ordinarily would be attributed to people. Whether that is good or bad is a discussion for another day.

The point here is this: Corporations can do whatever they want within the confines of the law. They answer only to their shareholders/stakeholders. Most try to give the customer what he/she/it wants.

Baseball fans are customers. It’s their buying power that makes the teams. players, and owners rich.

If a majority of baseball fans, or Coca Cola, Delta, or Home Depot fans, do not like the actions of the corporation, they can vote by not doing business with those corporations.

Voting with your feet makes little difference unless everybody does the same, and that’s unlikely. Being politely vocal and telling management why you disagree with their often hasty political statements will have more impact, especially if you can use social media to amplify your voice. But it’s unlikely enough people will actually follow through. Owners know that.

Ideological Divide

There is evidence that certain beliefs, ideologies, are going mainstream, including in the boardrooms of major corporations and faculty of some universities. When this happens, the ideological voice of corporate leaders is vastly amplified by the money they control.

When the Koch brothers, known as a conservative voice, put their money where their mouth was, the ideological left condemned the supreme court decision, Citizens United v. FEC that preserved their first amendment rights.

The same rights must be preserved for the Left, or any other voice that does not  call for violence.

The great danger of the current ideological divide resides in a gradual erosion of the safeguards the founders put in place. If an uninformed voting public can be influenced to vote away the safeguards, the United States of America will join previous civilizations that drifted from freedom and prosperity to tyranny and deprivation.