A national small business advocacy organization sent a letter to Major League Baseball (MLB) Wednesday railing against the corporate sports group’s decision to strip its summer All-Star Game from Atlanta, Ga., and move it to Colorado.
“The Job Creators Network (JCN) and the more than one million small businesses in the Peach State are outraged over the recent decision to relocate the Major League Baseball All Star game to Denver,” JCN President Alfredo Ortiz wrote to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. “For small businesses that have disproportionately suffered through government-imposed pandemic lockdowns over the past year, the financial loss is a punch to the gut and will have an outsized impact on minority-owned businesses.”
Oritz pointed out the racial disparities between Atlanta and Denver, where the Georgia city is 51 percent black and the Colorado capital is only 10 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Atlanta All-Star Game is worth upwards of $100 million in revenue, striking a blow to central Georgia after Republican lawmakers passed a new elections law which expands early voting. The MLB however, cited new restrictions in the bill, including voter ID requirements, hysterically covered as racist in the corporate press as reason to move the lucrative event across the country.
“Giving your organization the benefit of the doubt, the MLB’s choice to relocate the All Star game is based on a misunderstanding of the facts,” Oritz wrote. “Despite urban legend and your previous statement, the Georgia law makes it easy to vote and hard to cheat. It shouldn’t be controversial.”
Colorado meanwhile, already mandates voter ID and includes fewer days of early in-person voting than Georgia.
“The selective outrage from your office and others is backwards,” Oritz continued. “Small businesses in Georgia are hurting and you pulled a multi-million dollar rug out from underneath them.”
The Georgia boycott was promoted by President Joe Biden, who characterized the new voting law as a modern-day relic of the Jim Crow era.
