Food fight! It’s gotta take something for a former Commissioner of Major League Baseball to take on a successor as Commissioner.
But that is exactly what ex-MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent has just done – taking on current Commissioner Rob Manfred over removing the All-Star game from Atlanta and giving it to Denver as a way to punish Georgia for its new voting law. And the ex-Commish pulled no punches in a blistering Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal.
Among other things, Vincent said:
– Pulling the All-Star game from the majority black Atlanta to the heavily white Denver was a “serious mistake” and an “All-Star error.”
– “The commissioner politicized baseball over a law he likely hadn’t examined.”
– Manfred “didn’t limit the number of home games the Atlanta Braves will play.” Why asks Vincent? Because to do so would involve taking on the players union and an owner, in this case Braves owner John Malone. Both definite no-no’s in the world of baseball.
– “The only people hurt by Mr. Manfred’s decision will be Atlanta’s stadium workers and local vendors.” In fact,a full 30% of small business owners in Atlanta are black – and this will hit those black owners and the rest right in the pocketbook.
– Manfred did not “spell out specific criticisms of Georgia’s voting law.” And as a result now has to defend Colorado’s own restrictive voting law requirements. Like Georgia, Colorado requires ID for voters.
– Vincent accuses his successor of making baseball “a weapon in the culture wars.” (No kidding!)
– Vincent closed by saying that Manfred had plunged baseball into “politics and its dark elements of corruption, greed and sordid selfishness.”
In short, in operating in the dark as to what the Georgia law says and does, Commissioner Rob Manfred has ineptly made the MLB a source of the very racism he thinks he is opposing. He has seriously damaged the residents and businesses of a majority-black city and the 30% of minority-owned businesses in Atlanta. And in the ultimate insult, switched the All-Star game to an overwhelmingly white city – Denver.
But not to worry. Commissioner Rob Manfred is woke. So who cares about Atlanta?
Newsflash? Maybe, just maybe, the people who care about Atlanta are the people who live there. The majority of them black.
What a disgrace. And three cheers for former Commissioner Fay Vincent.
