MLB Falls Silent On Voter Suppression In China, Say, or Cuba

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While Major League Baseball is pulling its All-Star game out of Georgia, it turns out it’s been expanding into — wait for it — Communist China. Never mind that one can’t bring water to voters on line in the People’s Republic. No, of course not. There are no long lines of voters in China. It’s run by communists. Talk about voter suppression. They deny the right to vote to everyone, no matter what their race.

MLB doesn’t care. Commissioner Rob Manfred pulled the summer All-Star game out of Atlanta a little more than a day after President Biden said he would “strongly support” the move to protest Georgia’s latest election reform law. The election law might, as the Wall Street Journal notes in a terrific editorial this morning, offer more voting opportunities than New York, say, or Delaware. MLB doesn’t care.

Commissioner Manfred is playing pure Democratic Party politics. MLB is best seen as a partisan institution. Rob Manfred doesn’t have any serious engagement in respect of free elections. In 2016, he jumped on the bandwagon when President Obama went to Cuba. The commissioner went along, and the Tampa Rays played — and won — an exhibition game in Havana. It shocked the pro-freedom Cuban community in America.

That was well marked at the time in an epic on air primal scream for freedom by the radio host Dan Le Batard, whose parents fled communism in Cuba and made it to America (please watch the tape above). It makes one wonder by what standard of logic, or any other kind of reasoning, does Major League Baseball play an exhibition game in communist Cuba or pursue games in Red China while refusing to play in Georgia.

The answer, of course, is money. Yanking the All-Star game out of Georgia was a cheap gesture. China, and even Cuba, are potentially much more lucrative. A year or so ago, Yahoo News asked Commissioner Manfred about the uproar that engulfed the NBA after after Daryl Morey, then general manager of the Houston Rockets, issued a single tweet of support for the pro-Democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

“Sooner or later, something happens to everybody,” Mr. Manfred blathered. Then Yahoo News quoted him as explaining: “In terms of our own business, we have tried to invest in countries to grow the game where we feel like we have a stable, sustainable relationship with the government that’s in power. We’ve been able to do a lot of business in China, successfully, and we hope to do so in the future.”

How’s that for backbone as the Red Chinese suppress voting in Hong Kong? Our guess is that were the pro-democracy protesters to get a voting law like that just passed in Georgia, they would think they died and went to heaven. They’re not going to get that chance any time soon, though. And one — albeit only one — small reason is that the MLB’s Rob Manfred will look the other way.


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