The excitement of the home-run derby Monday evening, featuring a packed Colorado Rockies stadium and a show of power from the game’s biggest sluggers, was a stark contrast to Sunday night’s Major League Baseball Draft when MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred was booed loudly almost from the start.
For Will Hild, Executive Director of Consumers’ Research and spokesman for theConsumers First Initiative, an ad campaign targeting the “woke” corporate culture of MLB and other American businesses, the juxtaposition between the two events was likely unsurprising.
“Baseball is a sacred sport to Americans, as it should be,” Hild tells Townhall. “We’re not saying baseball is failing. We’re saying the league is failing its fans and its teams.”
It’s an important distinction, and one very much on display in two consecutive nights during the league’s All-Star Break, which has been publicly tainted by a move from Atlanta to Denver after Manfred’s decision to take a political position on the recently passed Georgia election reform legislation.
Hild’s group began their ad campaign in May by highlighting ways in which American Airlines, Nike, and Coca-Cola have all embraced a “woke” corporate culture. They’ve now entered phase two of the initiative with new ads targeting not justMLB(arguably the most compelling ad to date given the bipartisan criticism of the league), but also Ticketmaster’s corporate malfeasance and subsequent embrace of a leftist political culture.
And the order those things happen – the corporate bad behavior followed by an embrace of progressive political positions – is important, Hild says, while offering a caveat that he can’t speak for every company.
But those businesses targeted by the Consumers First Initiative? He’s comfortable speaking about them and the business practices that led to a corporate decision to “go woke” as a distraction from anti-consumer practices.
“The negligence…and decay comes first,” Hild says. “It’s just a cynical ploy to distract…I wouldn’t even give [these companies] the credit of saying they are genuinely taking a [political] stand. [It’s] very self-interested…and very dishonest.”
An easy example, he says, is American Airlines who faced legal troubles due to alleged discrimination, engaged in massive layoffs, and were generally highly unpopular thanks to bad customer service and purported inefficiencies.
“American Airlines was not taking positions on Texas legislation,” Hild says. “It was not germane to their business.”
Not surprisingly, as a distraction from their embrace of bad business practices, American Airlines – and Hild says this is a pattern with businesses that go woke – began to cozy up to leftist politicians and media to take the heat off. And ultimatelyvery vocally criticizedTexas' own election integrity legislation.
“We kept seeing this phenomenon with companies…that had real issues with how they treat their customers, how their products were made (tainted with forced labor), and [their efforts] to distract from those issues by going woke, as they say,” Hild says.
MLB is no exception.
“Attendance is down, ticket prices are up,” Hild says. “What’s important about this, is [how it’s] harming the national past time.”
In the case of MLB, Hild says Manfred’s political position on Georgia’s voting law – which led directly to the move of the All-Star Game and the loss of $100 million in revenue by some estimates – was little more than an effort to shift focus from “shady deals” the commissioner was engaged in with China. And, perhaps most importantly, to coddle a left-leaning press.
According to Fox News, that "shady deal" involved Chinese streaming service Tencent.
MLB signed a deal with Tencent Wednesday, one of China’s largest tech companies.
It’s one of the Chinese firms that briefly dropped NBA games in 2019 after former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey publicly voiced support for pro-democracy protesters facing a Beijing-backed crackdown in Hong Kong.
“When companies start to fail their customers…when they become more beholden to the CCP…that’s when you tend to see this type of phenomenon of going woke,” Hild says. “We’re not suggesting people should love baseball any less.”
But he and the Consumers First Initiative are suggesting baseball fans take a good, hard look at the league – and its commissioner – and decide if they need to save baseball from its own leadership.