The World Series will take place in two states this year: Texas and Georgia. Those are two of the states that many liberals dislike most right now.
And yet, despite calls from liberals to boycott these respective states earlier this year, there are no signs that Major League Baseball will move the World Series out of those two states. The Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros earned the right to be there. The fact that MLB won’t move the games shows the league was virtue-signaling when it moved the All-Star Game away from Georgia over voting laws earlier this year; it won’t do anything about the World Series because that would cost the MLB money, and there isn’t an active pressure to move the games.
When Georgia decided to require identification to obtain an absentee ballot and prevent campaign teams from handing out food and water with candidates’ logos on them while people are in line to vote, many liberals had a fit. Even President Joe Biden supported moving MLB’s All-Star Game out of Georgia as punishment to the right-leaning state that he won in the 2020 presidential election. Yet, at least a couple of World Series games will take place there this year.
The other games will take place in Texas. The state has received plenty of attention over the past two months for being the state that banned most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and is using private citizens to enforce the law. This has outraged the pro-choice side; the state is protecting the unborn and challenging the unjust Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey rulings that have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of unborn babies.
However, Texas and Georgia are also where most of the fans of these respective teams live. If MLB wants sellout crowds and to maximize TV ratings and merchandise sales, irking fans in those respective markets by taking a left-of-center political stance would be a terrible idea. It was dumb when the MLB did it for the All-Star Game, but that was an exhibition game that sells out regardless of where it’s played. These Braves and Astros fans have a far more vested interest in the biggest games of the season than they do in some exhibition matchup.
If MLB was serious when it boycotted Georgia, then maybe it wouldn’t play a World Series there. However, there aren’t calls for people to boycott the World Series in Georgia or Texas, so the MLB doesn’t have to pretend to care about either law that irks liberals. But just because Biden isn’t complaining about Georgia’s new voting laws anymore, that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. If the laws were so evil then, why are they fine now?
To their credit, MLB and other sports leagues are smart not to take action against Texas for being pro-life. Voter ID can help ensure election integrity, but there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States, no matter what former President Donald Trump says, so it’s a relatively small issue. Meanwhile, slaughtering the unborn is a far more serious matter.
If there were a market for a boycott that would help MLB’s bottom line, surely the MLB would do it. Thankfully, there is not, so it won’t alienate even more fans in the upcoming weeks.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
