Words. For Your Consideration...
"For 141 years, baseball has mirrored and propelled America's evolution. It has bridged class divisions, lifted the country's spirits in dark times and, ultimately, helped break down racial barriers. Today, with American values again under attack in Arizona, baseball needs to act.
Born at a time when the country was most divided, the game helped Civil War soldiers stave off fear and boredom. Young men of North and South picked up fence posts and tree branches and swung at balls of cork or knots of rags wrapped around walnuts. At that moment of ultimate American disunity, baseball united: Officers played with enlisted men; prisoners of war played against one another and even their guards. After the war, the game became the physical expression of our founding ideals and the vernacular of our lives, even for those who never rooted for a team or hit a ball with a bat. "Three strikes" describes our limited tolerance for failure; we "pinch hit" for others when necessary and cope with life's "curveballs."
...baseball is entwined with American life, not above it, and sometimes it suffers along with the nation. Decades of exclusion of black athletes from the major leagues gave the lie to the notion that the American dream could be attained by anyone. When Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson broke the "color line" and Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, it became a metric for American progress. Robinson's rookie year is as sure a precursor of Brown vs. Board of Education as was any decision of the Supreme Court. It was also one of those moments when the right business decision served the cause of social justice.
This is another such moment.
...We'd like to see Major League Baseball pull the 2011 All-Star game from Phoenix. There is ample and effective precedent. Pro football moved the 1993 Super Bowl from Arizona to Pasadena after Arizona refused to adopt Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday. In 1947, the Dodgers moved spring training to Cuba, abandoning Florida, to preserve the dignity of its one black player. Can the same game that stood for such principles half a century ago now allow its Latino all-stars to travel to Phoenix, where they could be treated as suspect because of the color of their skin?..."
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