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Yesterday, I saw and reluctantly read another political opinion column penned by a sportswriter. Of late, LA Times sportswriters have branched into political (often feckless) commentary that barely intersects sports with politics.
In 2021, LA Times sportswriter Bill Shaikin demanded that MLB move the All-Star Game from Atlanta to some other state.
If Georgia persists in pursuing laws that will make it harder to vote, and disproportionately so in Black communities, MLB should move the 2021 All-Star game out of Atlanta, @BillShaikin writes.https://t.co/awvFFegHSI
— L.A. Times Sports (@latimessports) March 25, 2021
He wrote:
If Georgia officials do not withdraw or reject the voter suppression bills, MLB will announce April 15 that it is withdrawing the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta.
Was it a “voter suppression” bill? Of course not. That was a lie. My colleague Brad Slager wrote:
The lies about the voter reform law recently signed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp have been significant, and they have become larger as they are being promoted from the very top, by President Biden. As he frequently declares this law is a return to the Jim Crow era — melodramatically describing it as ”Jim Crow on steroids’’, or when he lapsed into President Silver-Alert mode and called it ”Jim Eagle’’ — Biden has been delivering falsehoods on the law. Beyond the baseless claims that the reforms are targeting POC voters, he has said that the law closes polls at 5 pm on election day, and that water has been banned from polling locations.
The Atlantic Constitution was forced to write a correction:
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said the new law would limit voting hours. On Election Day in Georgia, polling places are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and if you are in line by 7 p.m., you are allowed to cast your ballot. Nothing in the new law changes those rules. However, the law made some changes to early voting. The bill adds a second mandatory Saturday of early voting for general elections but removes two weeks of early voting before runoffs.
No matter. MLB moved the 2021 All-Star game to… Colorado. The state of Colorado had in place a more restrictive voter statute than Georgia – but no matter, virtue signaling doesn’t require critical thinking.
Then in 2022, I wrote about Bill Plaschke offering his own “I don’t care about evidence” column when he demanded that the LA Dodgers cut Trevor Bauer:
In this morning’s Los Angeles Times, the predictable was written. Bill Plaschke wants Bauer gone, like, now. As in “14 seconds ago.” At the close of his column, he asked “Did this player just serve a record-long suspension for alleged violence against women?”
Yes, Bill, he did. Not for violence against women, but for the allegation. I make no apologies for looking at allegations through the lens of a lawyer (sorry, not sorry).
If two women came forward and alleged that a sports columnist with the LA Times committed violence against them, and he denied it, showed evidence that it was rough sex, and sued everyone involved to get his job back, would that famous sports columnist be willing to quit if the allegations were against him? I doubt it.
Again, I think Bauer is a weirdo, and I’ve never understood why that type of “sex” is a turn-on. And, if I owned the Dodgers I’d likely release him and wish him luck. But sports writers have a tendency to high-horse everything.
When riots broke out in LA, instead of condemning the rioters, sportswriter Dylan Hernandez condemned the Dodgers. The Dodgers were cowards for not condemning… ICE. For Hernandez, it wasn’t rioters lobbing rocks and frozen bottles of water at cops, or rioters torching cars, or looters stealing shoes, it was cops enforcing statutes, and he never mentioned that it’s not “immigrants” that ICE is after, but criminal illegal aliens.
Then came a cherry on the LA Times virtue-signaling cake. On Monday, a male Times sportswriter named Kevin Baxter began an opinion column with these four sentences:
Why is it always the women who stand up first?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. But it’s one that has a basis in fact because girl power is real.
From Joan of Arc to Cassidy Hutchinson, whenever men have proven too cautious, cowardly or complacent to act, women have had the courage to do the right thing.
What in the self-emasculating, turn-in-your-man-card drivel are you blubbering about, Kevin? Joan of Arc to… Cassidy Hutchinson? Of all the women to pluck from history you picked a French teen and a woman who thoroughly discredited herself after she claimed Trump tried to wrestle the steering wheel from Secret Service.
The only thing Joan of Arc and Hutchinson have in common? They both saw visions.
Baxter’s column alerts us to the fact that a women’s soccer team that most people never heard of wore T-shirts that read:
