Major League Baseball has picked Atlanta as its host city for the 2025 MLB All-Star game, just two years after pulling the 2021 All-Star game from the city over its voting laws, the Atlanta Braves announced on Thursday.
The Atlanta #Braves have been awarded the 2025 @MLB All-Star Game! pic.twitter.com/rZaqYOckwY
— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) November 16, 2023
In 2021, the league moved the game Atlanta, a majority black city, to mostly white Denver, citing Georgia’s election law, which included a voter ID requirement and limits on ballot drop boxes. “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” Commissioner Manfred said in a statement at the time.
The decision came at the behest of President Joe Biden following Georgia’s implementation of “The Election Integrity Act of 2021,” a bill Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
This was always an insane accusation. Georgia’s new law allowed more early voting days than Biden’s home state of Delaware, and Georgia voter turnout broke records in 2022. But remember, this whole dust-up happened in the heat of Floydmania. Back then you could call anything racist and the most powerful institutions in this country would submit to any demands to made.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp stayed strong though, calling the relocation “a purely political decision driven by pressure from Stacey Abrams and a lot of activist groups out there.”
“They lied about the Elections Integrity Act said it’s suppressive, said it’s Jim Crow 2.0. It’s not,” Kemp added.
A group of small business owners, the Job Creators Network, actually sued the MLB, claiming the move would cost the city’s mostly black-owned local business over $100 million. (RELATED: ‘Impossible To Square His Argument’: ‘Morning Joe’ Panel Hammers Biden For Punting On Masters After Stance On MLB All-Star Game)
Kemp responded to Thursday’s news on Twitter, writing that “Georgia’s voting laws haven’t changed, but it’s good to see the MLB’s misguided understanding of them has.”
Well well well… look who’s come crawling back. It’s great for the city of Atlanta and all the residents that will still live there in 2025, but how many were priced out of the metro area after their small business costs became too high? How many, likely black-owned, small businesses that just barely survived the pandemic missed out on a boondoggle of a weekend for their families because strangers they’d never met decided to play politics with their lives?
Economic impact studies vary as to just how much money the All-Star game brings in. Denver’s mayor estimated the 2021 switch would inject over $100 million into the local economy. One study from Baseball Almanac claims that the game has averaged over $70 million in net benefit for the host city since 1996. That may be just another drop in the Hunter Biden crack slush fund for the president, but to a family struggling to make ends meet, or a business owner trying to establish a foothold in his or her community, it could mean everything.
But instead, those business owners are shit out of luck. And there will be no accountability. The laws haven’t changed, but there probably won’t be a massive White House campaign to relocate the game to San Francisco or Seattle or some other city full of white yuppies who pretend to care about voting rights. Joe’s got an election to win. And Stacey Abrams probably won’t apologize for robbing her community blind just to put a feather in her cap. Nope. She got to go on TV and call Georgia’s voting laws racist (and then get absolutely destroyed in the 2022 election despite massive black turnout and a favorable environment for Democrats).
Needless to say, Colorado still requires identification to vote.