New in PJ Media:
In arguing in the Washington Post that Major League Baseball (MLB) should bar teams from holding spring training in Florida, Kevin B. Blackistone, a sports commentator for ESPN as well as the Post, invokes the bad old days of 1947, when several major league teams moved their spring training camps out of Florida because that state still had segregation laws in place. Ron DeSantis’ Florida, Blackistone claims, is just as bad as the Florida where black Americans were barred from the better hotels and restaurants, and vulnerable to harassment and even lynching. Is Blackistone hysterical? Of course, he is, and worse.
Spring training in Florida dates back to 1888 when the Washington Nationals (not the new team that plays for bureaucratic wokesters in the hunkered-down fortress that is officially known as the nation’s capital, but a long-defunct outfit from simpler times) became the first major league baseball team to head to Florida to get in shape for the coming season. It didn’t do much good: the Nats won 48 games and lost 86 that year and after the following season were out of the league altogether. But the Sunshine State’s gorgeous spring climate kept beckoning. In 1913, the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland (shield your kids’ eyes) Indians began training in Florida, and the year after that, the St. Louis Browns, St. Louis Cardinals, and Philadelphia Athletics all set up spring training facilities in the state. The Grapefruit League was born.
Quick now: who was the governor of Florida in 1888? What were his politics? How about 1913? Governors of Florida have come and gone, and baseball players have been training in Florida for over 100 years now, likely without paying much (or any) attention to the politics of the man (sorry, wokesters, there has never been a female governor of Florida, much less a cross-dressing trans governor of Florida or a black lesbian governor of Florida, but there’s always hope) in the governor’s mansion.
To be sure, Blackistone is right that some teams temporarily stopped training in Florida in the 1940s because of segregation. This was done in view of the fact that the Brooklyn Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson and several other teams would soon sign black players, and the teams that left Florida didn’t want to subject their black players to the humiliation of not being able to sleep or eat with the rest of the team.
While he presents his luckless readers with a long explanation of DeSantis’ alleged evils, Blackistone does not offer a single example of how the evil reign of this un-woke governor would disadvantage black players, or any other players, training in Florida. He does not, of course, because he cannot. He wants baseball teams to do what some of them did in 1947, but in 1947 they were responding to actual conditions of injustice that some of the players would themselves experience. There is simply nothing analogous to that in 2023, either in Ron DeSantis’ Florida or anywhere else in the country.
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Wellington says
To the Left, DeSantis is looked upon as unjust because he has dared to stand up to the rot, rubbish and even evil found in Leftism.
dazzleme says
Exactly Wellington!
somehistory says
The only drawback to the teams descending on Florida are the rental properties which force local citizens out for the time they want to rent…and get higher payments…from the members of the various teams.
It’s a negative, but not the fault of the teams or their members. It’s greed on the part of the property owners.
As for seeing a game, been there, done that, one night a long time ago. It was great.
James Lincoln says
Back in the 1970s, a good friend and I went down to Winter Haven, Florida to watch the Red Sox spring training schedule.
The team stayed in a fairly modest hotel / restaurant. The players were very friendly with the visiting fans and I got a nice picture with Carlton Fisk, the Red Sox catcher.
Haven’t seen them since they moved to Fort Myers… not sure what it’s like now.