Major League Baseball is taking a page out of the NBA’s book when it comes to social justice politics. That includes hypocritically chasing after the Chinese market while pretending that places such as Atlanta are the locus of evil in the modern world.
Rep. Jim Hagedorn, a Minnesota Republican, was among the members of Congress to introduce a resolution disapproving of MLB’s decision to move manufacturing jobs to China. The Minnesota Republican decried the league’s decision to shutter the Miken Sports plant in Caledonia, Minnesota, (his district) and move those jobs to China.
But the move is paying off for MLB. Chinese state media boasted that the league is building a “baseball ecosystem” in the country. That “ecosystem” includes more than 100 Chinese baseball teams in 20 cities. There has been an MLB Development Center in China for nearly a decade. MLB, like the NBA, has heavily invested in China.
And MLB, like the NBA, has shrugged off China’s human rights abuses while weighing in on American politics. The league actually went even further than the NBA has in the political sphere, pulling its All-Star weekend festivities from Atlanta after taking the Democratic Party’s lies about Georgia’s voting law at face value. Requiring voter ID for mail-in ballots is unacceptable, according to MLB leadership. But an authoritarian country that doesn’t hold legitimate elections and just abolished Hong Kong’s democracy? That’s a business opportunity!
After all, it was MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred himself who said that moving its All-Star weekend out of Georgia was “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.” One can only assume he gave the same due diligence on this issue and decided that the Chinese Communist Party, a genocidal organization responsible for more deaths than any other in the history of man, isn’t as bad as the U.S. Republican Party.
Or maybe he just decided that China is more profitable.
MLB reached a deal earlier this year with Chinese company Tencent to continue streaming MLB games, which Tencent has done since 2018. MLB also has a deal to bring its games to cable television in China until at least 2023. The league clearly wants a future in China, even if it means showing that its stand for “voting rights” in Georgia was a shameless partisan act of showmanship.
MLB leadership has decided the league will be harder on a U.S. state than on a country that is putting an ethnic minority into literal concentration camps. America’s pastime is selling out to China in real-time, even as it brands the opinions of half of Americans as unacceptable.
