The Call is Under Review
by Adam (@reality_signal)
Who radicalized you? It might have been Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. When he enters the Hall of Fame like all long-term commissioners do, he’ll be remembered for pushing the game into a new paradigm as distinct as the pre-modern and modern eras. The post-modern era of baseball: minimized contact, purist purge, revenue over aesthetics, and a faster pace of play. Eventually the game will resemble something like a synchronized dance routine on the field and a pride parade in the stands, which will at least distract from what it really is: AI simulations being tested against unfortunate variables like human performance. Enjoy its transition before the parts you like are cut up and replaced.
This is beside the point. New rules might inspire you to cancel auto-renew on the multiple streaming services you need to watch your team, but they won’t change the way you vote. There was another call by Commissioner Manfred that might have done that. It was made in the hysteria of Covid-Floyd, and was so obscene in how nonsensical and nakedly political is was – a microcosm of the era’s greater environment – that if you were paying attention and honest with yourself, then it had the potential to permanently change the way you view what’s happening in the world.
On March 25th, 2021, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed Senate Bill 202, and on April 2nd, Rob Manfred moved that year’s All Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, Colorado. Bill 202, known as the Election Integrity Act, was perceived by activists, corporations, and all your friends on Instagram as restrictive to voting rights. You remember 2021. Any personal or political action short of kneeling and holding up a fist was considered race hate. The blue team was confident and out for blood. So it didn’t take much for the legacy media to lob a narrative about this bill that people accepted without a hint of critical thought, all to advance election conditions favorable to their party and to punish political enemies.
From Manfred’s official statement: “I have decided the best way to demonstrate our value as a sport is by relocating this year’s All Star Game …” – and here I thought the best demonstration of baseball’s value was clutch hitting and athletic double plays – “… Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” Sounds reasonable. Being the commish is all about hearing from different sides, compromise, making a tough decision. Fans might be forgiven for their support. They were told the fascists were up to their old trick plays down there in the Deep South, installing more of the systemic oppression that was the only thing journalists were allowed to discuss for two or three years. But as it turns out, the media lied and the MLB couldn’t handle the pressure under the lights.
Here’s what SB 202 really did:
Expanded early voting, including weekends.
Allowed for counties to expand poll hours, despite President Biden’s outright lie hours were being reduced.
Standardized absentee drop box availability as one per 100k registered voters, leaving Atlanta with “only” 23 secure places to drop their ballot, and other parts of the state with even more access to drop boxes. That’s fewer drop boxes than in 2020 when they were added to accommodate pandemic voting. So yes, fewer drop boxes than when they were available for the first time and everyone was forced to use them. Prior to Bill 202, drop boxes weren’t part of state law at all, and counties weren’t required to have any. Now, all counties must have them.
Gave voters “only” 11 weeks to request an absentee ballot. This requires a Georgia ID number or copy of another form of ID – like a utility bill.
Banned outside groups from distributing water in line while allowing for poll workers to set up water stations. This one was trotted out as cruelty for its own sake. But as a Georgia voter I’ve never waited in line. I have to assume it does happen, and when it does, media will find it and hyper-focus on it. I’ve also never voted anywhere that didn’t have a water fountain. This is a non-issue that plays well with bleeding hearts for obvious reasons. By the way, groups can still hand out water or whatever else they want if they’re 150 feet away from the polling station.
Made election officials in precincts that have previously had long lines take steps to eliminate the problem, like making the precinct smaller or expanding staff and voting machines.
Allowed for the removal of election officials who break election laws, if they do it three times.
It’s not hard to imagine this exact bill passing in a blue state, and the media praising it as a triumph for “voting rights,” a phrase which itself advances a narrative that voting is still an area of social struggle. Calling out progressive hypocrisy is a waste of time, but sometimes you have to stand back in awe of what your betters are getting away with. It’s not only that libs would like a lot of SB 202 if they knew what was in it, and love it if MSNBC told them to, it’s that Colorado, where the game was moved, has more restrictive voting laws than Georgia:
Colorado already required voter ID. The “fact check” articles on this are classic Covid-era propaganda. Headline: “Colorado Does Not Require ID.” First paragraph: “Well yes, Colorado does require ID.”
Colorado had fewer in-person voting days than Georgia’s new law provided.
Watching the MLB act as the punitive arm of the Democratic party made clear the changes they want for their game: absentee ballots mailed to every address paired with no ID. These are the conditions needed to facilitate any fortification that might be necessary or helpful. In service of achieving those conditions, truth and reality might need to sit the bench for a while. That might be an obvious or even trite insight, but if you were tuning into this news cycle as an apolitical sports fan, expecting to see the version of politics you grew up with, but instead observed virtually all media along with the President of the United States baldly lying, you might have then adopted the “radical” viewpoint that someone, somewhere along the way, made some fundamental rule changes that you don’t like.
This entire All Star debacle was absurd to the point of being an inversion of reality. But like so many things that year, it hardly mattered. Manfred’s decision was made. Atlanta would have to pay the price for having a republican governor who hadn’t taken a knee. As has been pointed out by even the likes of progressive star Stacey Abrams, the real losers were Atlanta’s majority black population and business owners who lost out on a projected 100 million dollars in revenue. Hysterically decried as “Jim Crow 2.0” by a president who’s old enough to remember Jim Crow 1.0, the Election Integrity Act didn’t harm protected classes, but the blind regime reaction to it did.
So what started with a National Anthem sung by a guy from Hamilton ended with Trea Turner grounding out to second base and an eight-game National League losing streak. It doesn’t matter. It’s unwatchable. Since Manfred changed the rule that gave the winning league home-field advantage in the World Series, there are no stakes. Managers put the kid gloves on, players feign effort in the field and swing for the fences, fans find out what’s on their other channels. But the 2021 game was different, and for the wrong reasons. It should go down as a profound embarrassment for the MLB (it won’t). It should have had people like me tuning out for the rest of that season and beyond (it didn’t). But it might have shown some fans what was happening not only in baseball but in every other aspect of their lives: delusional tyranny on a scale never seen in this country, authoritarian displays of hierarchy, chuds being punished for not getting in line. But hey, maybe it ain’t that deep, right? And why am I still talking about Covid, when everyone else has moved on? It’s all just a game after all.
Adam is a major bro in the RC universe and can be found at @reality_signal on X (Twitter)