Watch: Republicans to Run Ads During MLB All-Star Game That Will Make MLB and Dems Cringe
Major League Baseball is about to get hit by a pitch.
Actually, it’s about to get hit by two pitches — advertisements from major Republican political groups that are going to use the MLB All-Star Game as a setting to embarrass Commissioner Rob Manfred for the disgraceful decision in April to move the Midsummer Classic from Atlanta to Colorado.
And one specific Democrat isn’t going to be happy about the ads either.
As CBS News reported Monday, ads by the National Republican Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee are set to air Monday during the Home Run Derby and Tuesday during the All-Star Game itself bashing the decision.
The RNC ad drives home the idea that Manfred’s decision to pull the game out of Atlanta to protest Georgia’s new voting law is hurting the black communities MLB claims to care about.
Starring former state Rep. Melvin Everson, a Republican and Baptist minister, the ad attacks the decision to move the game in brutal, racially conscious terms more common to Democratic political message the GOP communications.
But the point is made.
Democrat lies about election integrity hurt Georgians and their recovering economy.
Democrats stole Georgia’s All-Star Game to push their power grab and divisive political agenda. pic.twitter.com/QOXknR3JiP
— GOP (@GOP) July 12, 2021
“This was supposed to be Atlanta’s night,” says Everson, who represented Georgia’s 106th District, just outside Atlanta. “But we were robbed. Democrats stole our All-Star Game to push their divisive political agenda.”
Pretty much everyone who was even partially aware of the All-Star Game’s move understands Everson’s point. Atlanta and its area businesses were expecting a boost of about $100 million from the game.
In a city like Atlanta, which is roughly 50 percent black, a lot of that money would have ended up in the black community. Thanks to the decision to move the All-Star Game to Denver, a city that is roughly 75 percent white and only 9 percent black, that money is going to white-owned businesses instead.
Yet Democrats are the ones who care about diversity?
The biggest sham, of course, was that MLB was protesting a voting law that had been branded as “racist” by Democrats and the mainstream media simply for common-sense voting restrictions such as requiring identification for in-person voting and those requesting an absentee ballot.
“Politicians and corporations lie, while black communities got hurt the most, even though a majority of black voters support laws like voter ID. To Democrats, it’s just a game,” Everson says. “But we’re the ones who got played.”
The white liberals congratulating themselves for striking a blow against modern Jim Crow might want to chew on that one for a while.
Meanwhile, the senatorial committee’s ad will take particular aim at Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who was elected in a January special election and is up for re-election next November.
The ad slams the Democrat as refusing to condemn the decision to move the game — a decision that hurt businesses in Warnock’s own state so badly.
“Baseball’s Midsummer Classic, the All-Star Game. A $100 million boost to Georgia’s economy, until the radical left woke crowd took it all away,” a narrator states over baseball scenes.
“Senator Warnock’s voice cost Georgia $100 million,” the narrator says, before an appeal for donations to the Republican senatorial committee.
.@ReverendWarnock refused to condemn the MLB boycott that hurt Georgia families.
The NRSC is proud to remind voters in GA of the urgent need to replace Warnock next November. Watch our latest ad that will run during the @MLB All Star Game and Home Run Derby ⬇️: pic.twitter.com/mME1oPxAlL
— Senate Republicans (@NRSC) July 8, 2021
The political impact of the ads remains to be seen, of course.
Already, though, it’s clear that the fallout of the All-Star Game’s move hasn’t been what Democrats might have hoped.
For instance, when it started becoming clear how the MLB decision was hurting Atlanta businesses, Stacey Abrams, the failed candidate for Georgia governor who has built a political career on that failure, altered an opinion piece she wrote for USA Today to make it appear that she was not in favor of a boycott before it was announced.
(Besides proving how damaging the MLB move has been politically and the deception and cowardice of one of the country’s best-known Democrats, the incident helpfully demonstrated that the ethics of USA Today editors are in the toilet and only a fool would trust a mainstream media outlet blindly.)
But more than any damage to the liberal narrative, beyond any potential damage to Warnock’s expected re-election campaign, the ads are an unmistakable black eye for the reputation of Major League Baseball.
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Despite Manfred’s evident, unhealthy interest in combining sports and politics, his organization was under no compunction to surrender to the political currents of the moment. The Georgia election law is now basically old news — the subject of a lawsuit filed in knee-jerk fashion by the Biden Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland (a man who proves repeatedly how blessed this country is that he’s not on the Supreme Court) — but generating nowhere near the passion and hyperbole it did in the spring.
What MLB is left with is a stunningly bad decision, based on a stunningly bad reading of the Georgia election law (a law that seems certain to win in court, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that came down after the Justice Department lawsuit was filed).
It was a decision that soured countless baseball fans — disgusted by what was once the national pastime being turned into yet another vehicle for incoherent, baseless Black Lives Matter-style griping about the myth of “systemic racism” in the country.
And now it’s a decision that’s going to bring stunningly bad publicity to what should be one of baseball’s brightest nights of the year.
These are two pitches that are likely to hit home — and even more likely to hurt.
And MLB has it coming.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
