All-Star Game yanked from Atlanta
Atlanta lost Major League Baseball’s summer All-Star Game on Friday over the league’s objections to sweeping changes to Georgia voting laws that critics – including the CEOs of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola – have condemned as being too restrictive.
The decision to pull the July 13 game from Atlanta’s Truist Park amounts to the first economic backlash against Georgia for the voting law that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp quickly signed into law March 25.
Kemp has insisted the law’s critics have mischaracterized what it does, yet GOP lawmakers adopted the changes largely in response to false claims of fraud in the 2020 elections by former President Donald Trump and his supporters. The law includes new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control over how elections are run.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred made the decision to move the All-Star events and the amateur draft from Atlanta after discussions with the Major League Baseball Players Association, individual players and the Players Alliance, an organization of Black players formed after the death of George Floyd last year, the commissioner said in a statement. A new ballpark for the events wasn’t immediately revealed.
“I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB draft,” Manfred said. “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
Kemp called it a “knee-jerk decision” that means “cancel culture and woke political activists are coming for every aspect of your life, sports included. If the left doesn’t agree with you, facts and the truth do not matter.”
“This attack on our state is the direct result of repeated lies from (President) Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams about a bill that expands access to the ballot box and ensures the integrity of our elections,” Kemp said in a statement. “I will not back down. Georgians will not be bullied.”
American League
Baltimore 3, Boston 0: John Means pitched seven innings of one-hit ball, allowing a single to lead off the game and retiring the last 18 batters he faced on Friday to lead the Baltimore Orioles to a 3-0 victory over the Boston Red Sox in their rain-delayed opener.
Means struck out five and allowed just two baserunners – the other on an error – earning the win when Ryan Mountcastle doubled in two runs in the sixth to break a scoreless tie. Anthony Santander added an RBI single in the eighth.
Cedric Mullins and Pedro Severino each had two hits for Baltimore, which finished fourth in the AL East last season, one game ahead of the last-place Red Sox. Tanner Scott pitched one hitless inning and César Valdez got the last three outs for the save.
National League
Nationals-Mets series ppd: A COVID-19 outbreak affecting more than a third of the Washington Nationals’ roster caused the postponement of the 2019 World Series champions’ season-opening three-game series against the visiting New York Mets.
Four of Washington’s players have tested positive for the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, and another five were quarantining after contact tracing determined they might have been exposed, general manager Mike Rizzo said Friday in a video call with reporters.
“We’re in crisis management mode,” Rizzo said.
After games against the Mets scheduled for Thursday, Saturday and Sunday at Nationals Park were scratched, the next possible contest for Washington would be at home against the Atlanta Braves on Monday.