Posted on 11/02/2021 5:35:37 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last April, when Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star Game out of suburban Atlanta in what it thought was a strident example of the powerful corporate punishment states would face if Republican lawmakers passed laws MLB did not like, its corporate, academic and cultural peers applauded the move.
Commissioner Rob Manfred's decision was seen by those who agreed with him as a heroic one that leading American institutions should make when they want to counter what they consider a societal wrong.
In fact, Manfred was just trying to avoid being canceled by the mob. If he had really believed in what he did, he would have made a statement the day after the Atlanta Braves clinched their division last week declaring that none of the World Series games would be played in Atlanta because he is standing on his principles, outlined in the boycott.
But all along, Manfred acted from fear, not principle. He did not want anyone to protest MLB, so he cowered, accepted the mob's lies about the legislation in question and disparaged an entire state just to avoid a boycott.
That's what we call C-suite cowardice -- the way corporate America cries uncle, usually silently. Our cultural curators in corporations, academia, entertainment and the media will willingly make that happen over and over again until the day comes when people wise up and decide that the emperors have no clothes -- that the curators' opinions mean nothing.
For lifelong Atlanta Braves fan Joe Cobb, that tipping point already came. When I interviewed him in Georgia last spring about the boycott, Cobb said he was done with MLB, despite his undying love for the Atlanta Braves.
He has not looked back. Cobb said it isn't as hard as he had expected to follow through on his principled stand of refusal to consume something that had been such a part of his life. "If Major League Baseball truly wanted to make a statement," he told me, "they would have said, 'Not only will there be no All-Star Game in Georgia, there will be no playoff games or World Series played here as well.'"
The Athens native, who works as a training manager for a Fortune 500 company, remarked that there has not been a peep about Georgia's election reform law as the Braves have moved into the playoffs and now into the World Series. To him, that shows just how hollow and purely performative MLB's decision was last spring.
"I publicly said I would not watch the Braves, and I meant what I said," he added. "I know I'm just one voice. To me, the problem is that so many people caved, and now what do we have? Well, we have the World Series. That's great. And we've got full stadiums. That's great. But you know what else we have? Major League Baseball wasn't penalized. They got away with it. They were able to dictate and change people's lives, and there's no penalty for it."
The Cobb County Travel and Tourism Bureau estimated a loss of over $100 million in total for businesses across the county without the nearly weeklong event the All-Star Game host city experiences. Critics in corporate media who shared MLB's sentiments on moving the game to Denver predictably downplayed that number.
The All-Star Game audience this year had a slight bump over the 2019 audience. However, it was the second-smallest audience ever for the game.
Cobb said that before the controversy happened, he was pretty pumped about the prospects for this season. "I was really, really excited," he said. "And when this whole controversy blew up, I was like, I don't own a team. I don't own a newspaper. I don't have a public outlet. The only way that I can make my feelings known that I cannot reward a company when they do something so bad to other people is just not give them any of my money."
So he did not.
His stance has become a running joke with his family and friends, who ask him the day after every game whether he watched it. He has not watched, attended or streamed any game, not even the highlights.
"I'm just one person, but you know what? It is a principled stand, and I will stick by it. In good conscience, I couldn't do it if someone came up to me today and said, 'Here, Joe, here are two tickets to the World Series.' I would donate them. I'd give them to somebody else, but in principle, I just couldn't go."
Cobb said that baseball is the American pastime. "It broke color barriers," he said. "It has united people. But it has also had a history of overlooking their own personal scandals involving cheating, steroids and drugs. But God forbid, someone has to show an ID to vote in Georgia, and we're just going to punish you and never even apologize for it."
There are a lot more Cobbs in this country who have taken what they think are lonely stances against the big guys. They are mostly silent. You won't find them at a protest, or as online warriors, but collectively, they are affecting our cultural curators' bottom line, beginning with the loss of consumer trust that they'll do the right thing -- the most important relationship they have with their consumers, and one they cannot afford to lose.
I no longer pay attention to professional sports. And I don’t miss them one bit in fact I find all of the freed hours to be used in more beneficial ways
Manfred is a cheap political whore like silver and the NFL cat all cowards all the time
I can honestly state that I stopped watching baseball after the “homerun derby years” and what followed, stopped watching NFL after the “take a knee” started, never cared for pro basketball as always felt it was more about showboating, walked away from college basketball after Indiana destroyed their own program, and with the exception of Army-Navy I don’t even watch college football anymore.
I’ll be honest I don’t really miss it and since I’m not a social butterfly to begin with it hasn’t impacted me in conversations at all either.
More time to read or do other stuff.
This guy is right, if MLB was serious there never would’ve been a world series in ATL. But they weren’t serious. They were virtue signaling
Virtue signaling coupled with the clearly deeply-held opinion of MLB’s executive managers that blacks are incapable and/or too lazy to obtain an ID is not a tenable position to stick with in America’s “cancel culture”. Then again, MLB seems to be of the right “culture” not to be “cancelled”.
A brilliant piece of writing by Saleno Zito. She skillfully draws the reader into a clear statement of the problem of corporate cowardice, then nails them to the wall in the final paragraph.
This woman has been my favorite writer for 20 years. Outcry about her professional integrity are clear political attacks by the ethically challenged hacks. She is by any objective standard a world class journalist.
Wow. We’ve never even met, and you already can’t stand me?
Good points.
If they were really serious about this, they would not allow the Braves to play any games in Georgia. They would not just move the All Star Game, they would move the Braves franchise out of the state with alleged Jim Crow voting laws.
I hope the Braves can lock up the win tonight. I am so looking forward to Commissioner Rob Manford presenting the World Championship trophy to the executives, coaches and players for the Atlanta Braves. Let’s see whether he can voice all the great platitudes the commissioner always deals out to the winners every year. I hope everyone in Atlanta boos him with every sentence he utters. Manford is the worst baseball commissioner in my career.
Go Braves!
I was a Yankees fan since ‘61 and the M & M boys. have not watched a game since 2019. They and MLB and every other professional sports league are dead to me.
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