I would not be wrong to say that, for the average American, baseball is something of a religion. Of course, there are Americans who neither like nor watch baseball, but they are few and far between, and the exceptions only prove the rule. The names of baseball’s great players are better known than the names of presidents, and baseballs with their autographs are auctioned off for big bucks. The game, which causes foreigners some consternation – “how can it be interesting at all?” – has long been considered an iconic game in the United States for nearly a century and a half.
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One of the major events of the baseball world is the All-Star Game, or “Midsummer Classic.” It’s an epic matchup in which the National and American League baseball’s all-star teams from Major League Baseball, MLB, the equivalent of the NBA in basketball, the NFL in American soccer or the NHL in ice hockey, face off against each other. This is accompanied by a media-fueled frenzy and the disappearance of tickets from the free market long before the game begins. At the same time, ticket prices, to put it mildly, bite: In 2019, the average ticket price was $282, and speculators were reselling them for as much as $800. Now multiply that money by the 35,000 spectators who come to watch the game at the stadium on average. Good business!
The combination of people’s love of baseball and Americans’ propensity to make a show out of even a local event makes the All-Star Game one of the most anticipated and lucrative sporting events of the year, comparable to the Super Bowl, the final game of the American soccer champions. Naturally, there is a real fight for the right to host the All-Star Game, the winner of which receives a lot of bonuses.
Back in May 2019, Georgia’s capital city of Atlanta was chosen to host the Midsummer Classic for the 2020 season. But last year, the All-Star Game was not held because of the pandemic. This year, even though there were even more people sickened and the number of COVID-19 victims in the United States passed half a million, it was decided not to forgo the match. After all, the favorite of American liberals, Joe Biden promised to vaccinate about 90% of the country’s population by April, 19 (not mentioning, of course, the fact that both the vaccine and the algorithms of its delivery to the USA were developed under his predecessor) which means that the terrible virus will be defeated by the summer. Atlanta officials were already gearing up for the landmark event, scheduled for July 13, when suddenly last Friday MLB executives, represented by its commissioner Robert Manfred, Jr. announced that there would be no All-Star Game in the Georgia capital. “I decided the best way to demonstrate our values was to move the All-Stat Game and the MLB draft to another city,” Manfred said.
So what’s the point and what do the values have to do with it?
The reason is a law passed in late March in Georgia that limits the potential for election fraud at all levels. Lawmakers in the state learned the lessons of the November 2020 presidential election and the January 2020 U.S. Senate re-election, when the Republican state unexpectedly sent two very liberal Democratic senators to Washington. The new law severely limits remote and early voting, including by mail ballot.
You must now present a strong argument to receive a postal ballot, and – very importantly – an ID, at least a driver’s license.
Acceptance of postal ballots is limited to the closing hour of the polls (which eliminates the possibility of “magic” bags of ballots for one of the candidates in the middle of the night, as happened more than once during the November elections). Observers from each candidate are entitled to be present during the vote count. All in all, very smart and prudent amendments to the electoral laws, which, as the events of recent months in the U.S. have shown, leave not even loopholes, but huge holes for abuses and falsifications.
As soon as both Houses of Congress voted in favor of the law, and Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp swiftly signed it into law in two hours! – approved it with his signature, the Democrats attacked the Peach State with such fury, as if the time of the North-South war had returned, and Atlanta was once again a citadel of Confederate resistance (very vividly described in Margaret Mitchell’s great novel, Gone with the Wind – though back then the Democrats were the party of Southern slave-owners, and the Republicans represented the interests of Northern abolitionists).
A variety of activists and human rights activists cried with one voice that the new law was against voters of color because it would largely “disenfranchise them.
