Believe it or not, opening day for Major League Baseball is nearly here. Spring training and the associated Grapefruit League, MLB pre-season, will end in 20 days. It’s not a full-blown contact sport but a grueling one with a 162-game regular season. The comforting aspect about baseball and those who get extended is that those contracts are about as ironclad as possible, so hats off to those lads who get the Aaron Judge/Mike Trout-like contracts. Clubs are all looking to win the World Series, but clinching their division is also paramount.
No one thinks about Ron DeSantis except for some in the elite media. The Washington Post had an op-ed whining about DeSantis’ education agenda in the state. The best part is that towards the end of the piece, they admit that the clubs who practice in Florida aren’t leaving now, obviously, or even next year. Additionally, Arizona, where other professional franchises hold their respective spring training exercises, doesn’t have enough facilities to accommodate the entire league.
Yet, that’s what’s the core of this noise machine: they will make you care. Or at least they will try their hardest. Threading the Jackie Robinson moment and DeSantis’ education initiatives is also a stretch. In 1947, there was systemic racial segregation codified by law; that no longer exists. DeSantis aiming at a more propagandist curriculum grounded in academic fraud isn’t the same. And history isn’t repeating itself, again showing that the Left is illiterate in this field (via WaPo):
The teams of Florida’s Grapefruit League, including the Washington Nationals in West Palm Beach, aren’t going to pack up their bats and balls this year or even next for confines in Arizona. It is impractical. There aren’t enough facilities in Arizona, and there are contracts in Florida that would have to be breached.
But they could collectively, or through MLB’s front office, let their displeasure with DeSantis’s leadership, with its hints of the troubling days of yesteryear, be known. After all, so many of the issues DeSantis has made noise standing against are the same issues baseball has made noise standing for in recent years. Diversity. Inclusion. Education about the game’s (and the country’s) unsavory racial past, which merits at least a small display now at its Cooperstown, N.Y., museum attached to the Hall of Fame.
The teams could remind DeSantis of the 2018 study that estimated spring training injected $687 million into the state over a little more than six weeks.
As Robinson wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier at the end of his last spring training in 1956, despite being at the Dodgers’ special Vero Beach camp, where Rickey and co-owners Walter O’Malley and John Smith developed the housing and dining sites so all of their players could live and eat together: “To a large extent the Southerners, particularly those in politics, are to blame [for Jim Crow]. On the other hand, it’s my belief that baseball itself hasn’t done all it can to help remedy the problems faced by those playing in organized baseball. Baseball, as everyone knows, is big business. It is my belief therefore that pressures can be brought to bear by organized baseball that would help remedy a lot of the prejudices that surround the game as it’s played below the Mason-Dixon Line.”
If history is repeating itself in Florida, so, too, should Robinson’s sentiment.
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If my team were the Washington Nationals, I’d be looking to whine about something, too. Aaron Judge is being paid $360 million over the next nine years to help the Yankees win rings. The New York Mets will pay a premium luxury tax chasing the same goal. Their rosters are focused on winning games, not on sticking it to Ron DeSantis.
No one cares. No one, except liberals, who probably don’t watch baseball.
H/T OutKick
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