The 2025 Major League Baseball All-Star game will be played in Atlanta, Georgia, despite its past boycott over the state’s voter laws, which it compared to Jim Crow.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced on Thursday that the game will be played in Atlanta in 2025 following an owners’ meeting. Per ESPN:
Atlanta was awarded the 2021 All-Star Game in May 2019, but MLB moved it in April 2021, just three months before the game was played.
Critics complained then that the voting rights changes were too restrictive. Manfred made the decision to move the All-Star events and the amateur draft from Atlanta after discussions with individual players and the Players Alliance, an organization of Black players formed after the death of George Floyd in 2020.
Democrat politicians at the time event went as far as to call the voter laws a resurgence of Jim Crow. As Breitbart News reported at the time, the MLB commissioner even pulled the all-star game after speaking with failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
“According to a report from Fox Business Network’s Charles Gasparino, sources inside Major League Baseball claim that Commissioner Rob Manfred ‘blindsided”’MLB owners with ‘at least’ the ‘timing’ of his decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta. Moreover, Gasparino’s report claims that Manfred spoke with defeated 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams before he decided to move the game,” the report said at the time.
SCOOP: @MLB sources say owners were blindsided at least by the timing of @RobManfred's decision to pull the All-Star game from Atlanta. Also said his decision came after speaking w @staceyabrams, which is odd since she has now said she's against the boycott. Story developing
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) April 7, 2021
The MLB did not explain how the state is suddenly safe to play baseball in despite no significant change to the voter law two years later.
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