While the baseball world has focused on the now-vacant All-Star Game at Truist Park following the league’s decision to yank the game from Atlanta, a bunch of young boys just wanted to play ball in the Peachtree City Invitational in Georgia.
At the school-year-participation level, the game that had the least amount of dilution per year comes right before the pre-Olympic season. So starts this season’s most rare and contorted scenario.
Normally, the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings see their season open in April, when Rochester makes its first visits to Columbus , Louisville and Toledo .
But this is no normal year. The MLB schedule was pushed back because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and many minor-league teams have had their schedules altered as teams were assigned to alternative sites to begin their 2021 seasons in a COVID-19 bubble of sorts.
The Red Wings are one such team, and Truist Field in Atlanta has gone from the opposite of bubble to the epicenter of political sports warfare nationwide in a matter of weeks. All for what is essentially an exhibition game in the MLB Midsummer Classic that got canceled following political pressure due to Georgia’s election reform laws.
Some lawmakers may be against it, but an overwhelming majority of MLB fans believe the game should have stuck in Atlanta.
The Independent Journal Review, which gathered data via a Mixpanel survey from April 8-9, reported only about 28% of fans believe the Midsummer Classic should have been moved, while a whopping 72% of fans said it should not have been moved.
The politically polarizing debate boiled over to such a degree that the Triple-A Syracuse Mets announced they nixed a scheduled performance by a Christian band sponsored by Congressman John Katko, a Republican who represents the area in Congress, because the MLB rehomed the All-Star Game away from Atlanta.
Politics is now so pervasive in sports that businesses are taking sides in a partisan issue. Major League Baseball took a side. Syracuse’s Triple-A team took the same side, although most fans surveyed didn’t want the game moved.
As this controversy continues to simmer, one heartwarming story from the Peachtree City Invitational serves as a reminder that baseball is, above all else, a game meant to be played and enjoyed by all. And sometimes, it takes a young boy with quick reflexes to remind us of that simple fact.
At a game between the Bulldogs and the Rangers, a young batboy was doing his job dutifully by retrieving a bat after a player’s at-bat. But instead of just tossing the bat back, this batboy got creative and decided to spice things up a bit.
As the player was rounding third and heading for home, the batboy quickly positioned himself to act as a base coach, waving the player on to home plate.
However, as the player approached, the batboy realized that the runner ahead of him was about to be thrown out at home. Without missing a beat, the quick-thinking batboy pulled back his arm and made an incredible one-handed catch of the ball, keeping the runner safe and securing the win for his team.
It was a small moment in an otherwise unremarkable youth game, but it serves as a reminder that in the midst of all the politics and controversy surrounding baseball, there are still young boys (and girls) who just want to play the game they love. And for that brief and beautiful moment, nothing else mattered but the game of baseball.
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