Rug Burn Junky on 31/3/2007 at 21:18

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You do realize that nobody gives a shit about exhibition baseball games?

Ko0K on 31/3/2007 at 22:51

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Apparently it's a bigger deal to someone from England/Europe area than it is to me. Heh heh... Anyway, I never even heard of this.

demagogue on 31/3/2007 at 23:40

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Considering that the championship is called the World Series, I'm not surprised that the entire world cares so much about American baseball.

But yeah, exhibition games are something like a game you'd take a single's club full of people that don't follow baseball to so they can break the ice and hang out. It has nothing to do with a team's progress in the regular season. The fact that it has a theme to get people to come just makes it look all the more like a gimmick.

Edit: Well this quote by the MLB Commissioner sums it up:

SD on 1/4/2007 at 21:55

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Meh. It's just another empty gesture in which we try and show how far we've come with civil rights when we haven't come anywhere near as far as we'd like to think.

It's like the recent events to celebrate the bicentennial of the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act) slave trade act, which is all somewhat obscene when there are more slaves in the world today than there were back then.

When things actually change for the better, then we can all slap ourselves on the back and say how well we've done. Until then, I'll treat occasions like this with the utmost cynicism.

demagogue on 1/4/2007 at 22:43

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I don't know. My first reaction was that they were way overplaying their hand. I mean, when people think about the civil rights movement, you have the abolitionists, voting and the equal protection cases, the professional schools (first with black-only, then integrating), the military (first with black units, then integration), public schools, voting rights act, etc., etc, all these big milestones...

Then you have baseball's Jackie Robinson. A good ball player that was lucky enough to enjoy a white lifestyle (although not losing the prejudice) before any other blacks could. If he did anything, it was largely symbolic. And baseball's "contribution" to civil rights goes downhill from there. (And if it didn't contribute much, it doesn't have much moral standing to really pay homage to a movement of which it wasn't really a part.)

One reason that I can give it some credit is that I went to one of those WWII veteran's gatherings in D.C. A black former ship gunner was talking, and he said when he was on his ship, fighting along side whites, he was still very prejudiced, and even risking his life wasn't enough to get any respect. Then one day there was a radio news report, and everyone on the ship heard that a team had signed up a black player to play professional baseball. He said it was the first time in his life that whites looked at him with respect, and to those that didn't he said he felt like for the first time he didn't have to give a shit: a black man was playing professional baseball. And all these decades later, he still got choked up, and said that was probably one of the most important days of his life.

So I guess it's easy to dismiss symbolic crap these days as just distracting people from the real problems. But I was struck to see how much it meant a lot to the blacks living at that time.

I still feel like this game is something of a gimmick, though.