Major League Baseball gambled, and MLB lost. Baseball fans weren’t buying the removal of the All-Star Game from “Jim Crow” Georgia, and they weren’t tuning in to the Colorado all-star game on Fox Sports Tuesday night. Television viewership was the second-lowest in All-Star Game history.
There have been a lot of reports lately about sports severely hemorrhaging fans, and baseball isn’t alone in paying a steep price for cramming woke social justice madness down the throats of sports fans. We’ve been chronicling the great fan tune-out of NFL and NBA broadcasts, along with ESPN programming, as well.
Just 8.2 million people watched the Summer Classic, beating only the 2019 game. By just one percent. This low figure corroborates a YouGov / Yahoo News poll that found almost half of U.S. sports fans had changed their sports viewing habits. This was prompted by pro sports swinging far to the Left.
The 2021 all-star game was going to be held in Atlanta. But when Republican state lawmakers in Georgia passed legislation to protect voter integrity, President Joe Biden called it “Jim Crow,” and MLB buckled to left-wing pressure to move the game. It was played in Denver, even though Colorado has tighter voting regulations than Georgia. Stupid is as stupid does, baseball.
Here’s further evidence of how Americans are repudiating wokeball sports. In 1980, 36 million people watched the telecast of baseball’s All-Star Game. No matter whether they were gone fishing or watching paint dry Tuesday, multitudes of fans clearly wanted no part of another sport capitulating to the radical Left.
Among those viewers were people as young as age 2, kids who have no clue what a baseball game is.
This goes deeper than the Georgia issue, too. Baseball jumped in bed with Black Lives Matter last summer. Last month, it went hog wild bending the knee to LGBT pride month. Major League Baseball has gone fully woke – at its own peril.
Yahoo Sports shamefully tried to shield MLB from Tuesday’s embarrassment with the headline, “Shohei Ohtani, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. help boost MLB All-Star Game ratings in 2021.” Three paragraphs in, Chris Cwik’s story says the 2021 game “is up slightly compared to 2019, the last time the event was held.” No mention of the great viewership from pre-woke years. Sounding like a PR man for baseball and the Democratic Party, Cwik spins it this way.:
"Despite the excellent young talent on display, there was no guarantee the All-Star Game would see higher ratings in 2021. After the league decided to move the game away from Atlanta due to Georgia's voter restriction laws , some Republicans announced they would boycott the sport.”
Cwik also says that, if Twitter can be believed, that boycott “wasn't as effective as they might have hoped. Baseball simply has too much young talent to keep fans away, and Ohtani and Guerrero — among many others — are hugely responsible for that.”
Talk about drivel. Try as he might, Cwik cannot explain away the painful truth that woke baseball shot itself in the foot. The only thing “classic” about this year’s “Summer Classic” was baseball’s huge political blunder.