Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta, Georgia, continues to draw backlash from the Peach State.
The Washington Free Beacon reported the reactions from small-business owners in the state, including Darrell Anderson, who is black. Anderson owns a limousine business in Atlanta and told the outlet that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision to pull the game would hurt the city, which is still reeling from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
“As the owner of a transportation service in Atlanta, I know firsthand how badly our community wanted the All-Star Game played here,” Anderson told the Free Beacon. “The $100 million in revenue to this area was going to be the opportunity for all of us to recover some of the losses that we incurred during the pandemic. Now, not only is that revenue gone, we may lose even more because conventions that were planned for Atlanta are now up in the air thanks to this decision by the MLB.”
Anderson also told the outlet that the MLB needs to separate sports from politics.
“When Big Business teams up with politicians, they make bad decisions, and small businesses and their hardworking employees suffer the most,” he said. “Politics should be decided at the ballot box. It has no place in making business decisions like where to hold the All-Star Game.”
Alfredo Ortiz, president of a small-business advocacy group known as the Job Creators Network, told the Free Beacon he sent Manfred a letter last week demanding that he reverse his decision to pull the All-Star Game. Ortiz said that Manfred’s decision would “have an outsized impact on minority-owned businesses.”
“Your decision is punishing the very group you claim to be defending,” Ortiz told the outlet. “Small businesses in Georgia are hurting and you pulled a multi-million dollar rug out from underneath them…. Don’t let activist groups weaponize America’s pastime to push radical ideas that MLB fans don’t support.”
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Democrats and their media supporters spent days spreading misinformation about a newly passed election law in Georgia, falsely framing the new law as a return to “Jim Crow” and claiming it prohibited voters standing in line to vote from receive food or water. Further, these same people claimed the law restricted voting hours, which it did not.
The MLB pulled the game based on these falsehoods, and some of the people who pushed them then complained about the consequences. Failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, for example, called the new law “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie” and then released a statement claiming to be upset that MLB would boycott the state based on the things she and others said about the bill. President Joe Biden also spread falsehoods about the Georgia bill and even said he “would strongly support” players who advocated for changing the state of the All-Star game. Biden later acknowledged the consequences of the MLB’s decision, The Daily Wire reported.
“There’s another side to it too, the other side to it too is when they in fact move out of Georgia, the people who need the help the most, people who are making hourly wages sometimes get hurt the most,” Biden said at a press conference on Tuesday. “I think it’s a very tough decision for a corporation to make or group to make. But I respect them when they make that judgment.”