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The lessons of a lifetime romance with baseball — good and bad

The romance with baseball begins early and lasts a lifetime.

It starts out as simple as playing catch with dad on Sunday mornings after church. Sixty years later, I remember every second with the clarity of a moment ago.

Then it grows with learning how to pitch by throwing to my neighbor, Gary Welteroth, the son of a former major league pitcher.

When Little League years dawned, friendships came with baseball. Rick would stop at my house and we would walk through Brandon Park to every game Ocker’s Fuel Oil played. Teddy was my best friend on the All-Star team. Coach Joe Brown was my first pitching coach, and through him I met his two sons. And years later, he would be the car mechanic keeping my $750 Malibu on the road through college.

Together, the five acquaintances courtesy of Little League years served a much greater purpose. For a kid growing up in a white neighborhood, the five of them comprised my first experiences with black people.

Because first impressions tend to be indelible, my experiences with them showed me skin pigmentation is something we are born with but character is how all of us must be defined. Those black lives mattered 55 years before slogans and a movement told me how to think.

Baseball gave me that lesson.

Little League years turned into teen years and awareness of how shamefully segregationist baseball had been at its highest level until Jackie Robinson overcame hate with actions and dignity. As late to the integration party as baseball was, its admission of Robinson goosed the breakdown of other horrible practices of racial inequality.

Baseball gave us that lesson.

Teen years bled into college years and there we all sat in the dormitory television room, watching Hank Aaron break Babe Ruth’s home run record in Atlanta. We later found out Aaron came to bat with death threats in his mind from racists warning that if he hit a home run to eclipse the magical Ruth’s record he would not make it around the bases.

So, when a few people came running on the field during Aaron’s home run trot, were they well-wishers or assassins? Aaron’s nonchalance masked whatever was going through his mind.

It was a window into Aaron’s quiet courage that, much more than the huckster sloganeering of today, turned racism into petty irrelevance and instinctively created a hunger for racial unity.

Baseball gave us that lesson.

Such are the ways sport teaches us life’s most vital lessons with the natural learning cycle that sprouts from simple actions and relationships unfettered by agendas.

That reality makes it sad and disappointing to watch baseball become part of a corporate/political movement that separates people based on assumptions with no factual roots, all in the misguided attempt to court an illegitimate moral power structure.

Shamed by politicians and pushed by President Biden, Major League Baseball has pulled its All-Star game and related festivities from Atlanta in protest of Georgia’s election law, swallowing the mob message that the changes are a racist rewind of the Jim Crow era. The action will cost Atlanta $100 million in business income, most of it to small businesses in desperate need of a post-pandemic windfall. Atlanta is 50 percen t black and a significant portion of the disadvantaged businesses are black-owned and with heavy black employment. Baseball is moving the game and festivities to Denver, which is 85 percent white.

So the logical question would be: What racist-inspired changes did Georgia make that precipitated this action, which ultimately will penalize black people more than anyone else?

Well, the state is requiring voters to present an ID, the same thing you need to do almost anything of importance in 2021. It is calling for signature verification changes to assure everyone’s vote, regardless of race, economic standing or voting precinct, counts equally. The battery of Georgia’s election regulations is not more restrictive than other states and more lenient than President Biden’s home state of Delaware.

But never mind that. The social activist mob obsessed with dividing by race has an agenda to push, including the federalizing of elections. Baseball just showed us complying with that agenda is more important than the inconvenience of voting regulation changes to preserve the credibility of future elections, the lifetime romance with millions of us be damned.

That is a lesson baseball is giving us that is alarming and regrettable.

Shame on Commissioner Rob Manfred for caving in. Shame on race hustlers who show every day they care more about political advantage than promoting the real unity we all should seek. Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and the five people who showed me the beauty of racial unity deserve so much more than this shameful political carnival.

David F. Troisi is retired as editor of the Sun-Gazette. None of the opinions expressed necessarily represent the views of the Sun-Gazette.

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