AMAC Exclusive – By B.C. Brutus
The Los Angeles Dodgers will take the field Friday evening amid significant controversy following their decision to honor the anti-Catholic “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” on the field as part of the club’s pride night.
The Dodgers are hardly the only team to embrace the left’s cultural agenda in recent years, and Major League Baseball is hardly the only professional sport that has gone woke. But the dystopian spectacle of one of the league’s most storied franchises honoring a group of drag performers who mock the crucifixion of Christ with an award for “service to the community” nonetheless perfectly captures how baseball has become an especially prized target in the left’s crusade to erode the foundations of American culture.
With June – pride month – falling in the middle of baseball season, it’s perhaps no surprise that major league stadiums have now become stages for leftists to push their increasingly radical ideology on people just looking to watch a sporting event.
But the left’s drive to co-opt baseball is about more than just a convenient calendar overlap. Although football has long since surpassed baseball in terms of popularity, baseball retains its central place in the American culture. It is deeply woven into U.S. history, with its own cast of heroes that embody classic American virtues – virtues that the left is desperate to undermine, and heroes that they are determined to replace with their own.
Take, for instance, the Dodgers’ own history. On April 15, 1947, a 5’11” 204-pound infielder named Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier wearing a Dodgers uniform. Despite facing jeers and even threats of violence, Robinson would go on to become a six-time all-star, leading the league in stolen bases twice and winning the 1949 National League MVP award. Robinson’s close friendship with star Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese, who was white, rankled the New York press at the time, but still serves as a powerful example of racial reconciliation even in the depths of the Jim Crow era.
There are countless other similar moments throughout baseball history that reflect the very best of America. Who can forget the iconic moment of President Bush throwing a perfect-strike first pitch during the 2001 World Series in New York following 9/11? Or Sammy Sosa trotting the bases after a home run carrying an American flag? And of course, the famous scene of Rick Monday – another Dodgers legend – saving Old Glory from being burned on the field by protestors in 1976?
The left wants to erase all of these memories that unite the country behind a shared set of traditional values. Instead, they have a new cast of heroes in mind for baseball fans. Out with Jackie Robinson as a symbol of unity, and in with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as a symbol of anti-Catholic bigotry. Out with patriotism, and in with divisive identity politics.
Although proponents of pride-themed events have argued that they just want to promote inclusivity, inviting an explicitly anti-Catholic group hardly seems “inclusive.”
MLB teams have also signaled that they will crack down hard on any players who might disagree with left-wing dogma on the issue. Earlier this month, for example, the Toronto Blue Jays cut pitcher Anthony Bass from the team just days after he posted a video to social media encouraging Christians to boycott Bud Light and Target.
Although Bass later issued another post apologizing for his “hurtful video,” it wasn’t enough to save his career. Blue Jays manager Ross Atkins insisted the decision to cut Bass was primarily based on performance, but he also said “distraction” played a role in the decision, and the timing seems suspicious at best.
No team ever told LGBTQ-identifying individuals that they couldn’t purchase tickets to watch a baseball game just like everyone else. But the Blue Jays, Dodgers, and virtually every other team are most assuredly telling Christian players, and by extension fans, that their views are not welcome. Instead of charting a course of neutrality in the culture wars, MLB, just like every other powerful institution, has chosen a side and taken up arms against conservatives.
MLB has also taken a political stance on other hot-button issues. In 2020, clubs fully embraced the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements, with players kneeling before games and kowtowing to the mobs that were burning America’s cities to the ground. In 2021, MLB moved the All-Star game out of Atlanta over Georgia’s new voter ID law that the media baselessly insisted was “racist” – a decision for which MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred was booed during the World Series in Atlanta later that year.
All of this has been a concerted and intentional effort to turn baseball into a political messaging tool for the left. The goal is to take something that is quintessentially American and infuse it with woke ideology in order to re-define what America means in the eyes of her people.
Now, the only question is how much longer baseball’s rapidly declining fan base will go along with it.
B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.
