Tag: Major League Baseball

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio says Major League Baseball can end the dangerous practice of Cuban athletes being trafficked through third countries by changing its own rules, without dealing with the Cuban government. Rubio said on Twitter Saturday the major reason baseball players undergo such travel risks stems from a requirement athletes establish “fake” residency in a country beside Cuba before signing a contract with an American ball club. “Instead of getting rid of this rule, they chose to pay ransom to the regime with a portion of the players salary,” Rubio said. Rubio immediately came out against a deal announced Dec. 19 between MLB and the Cuban Baseball Federation that would allow Cuban players over age 25 and with six years of professional ball experience to be released to play in the U.S. league. The Republican senator joined with U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and incoming U.S. Sen. Rick Scott in calling for President Donald Trump’s administration to block the deal. At that time, Rubio said players should be allowed to negotiate their own contracts and that the arrangement with the CBF forced players to cede their rights to the Cuban regime. MLB officials have pushed back on political criticism, saying the arrangement would eliminate the risks athletes take to flee Cuba for a chance to play American baseball. In 2016, as President Barack Obama sought to normalize relations with Cuba, the federal government recognized the federation as an organization with which American businesses could negotiate independently. Rubio has maintained the sports organization remains part of a hostile regime hurting its own people, and that would include taking pay from MLB athletes playing in the U.S. under the new deal. MLB officials say they negotiated the arrangement with CBF over the course of three years.

And if you found yourself outraged this week about how Major League Baseball could possibly have donated money to the Senate campaign of a white candidate who had just made flippant remarks about public hangings in the Deep South, it’s the answer to why it happened, how the backlash caught the league off-guard, and what to expect in the future. The league has actually donated $10,000 to her campaign this year, despite the fact that she represents a state with no major-league franchise. MLB teams’ public-facing presentations are, increasingly, reflective of the diverse urban environments in which most of them play more and more these days. The Nationals have hosted a Night Out for the entire 14 years the team has been in D.C., which has grown into the largest LGBTQ event in sports, drawing 3,500 people this year. Many have Hispanic Heritage Nights, or Jewish Heritage Nights, or any number of other celebrations of the diversity that lives in their backyard. But they are a heavily customer-dependent business, and a public-facing representation of the cities and states in which they play, most often content to take public money so long as it serves them. For an example of this in practice, look no further than the backlash to Washington’s decision to sign Reuben Foster this week. That’s the problem with taking an approach toward your business doings in the way that industries that look nothing like baseball and have few of any of its fan-based considerations have done business in Washington for years. It was a clear signal something was changing in the way the league intended to do business. MLB’s lobbying worked for one bill.

This is a special time for baseball fans. Major league baseball is ready to begin another season, with spring training officially opening this week. With some exceptions, fans in most cities can at least dream of watching their team play in the postseason and maybe even compete for the World Series championship. Once that victory is secured, Democrats dream of finding the perfect candidate to win back the presidency in 2020. Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy in baseball or politics. When Barack Obama upended conventional campaign wisdom by defeating Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and then went on to beat two respected Republican opponents in the 2008 and 2012 general elections, a similar wave of out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new sentiment took over the Democratic Party. In 2016, this fascination with data analytics led Hillary Clinton to choose Robby Mook as her campaign manager, putting the data guy squarely in charge. But her campaign ignored the equally important role played by David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager, who brought his accumulated wisdom from a lifetime spent in political campaigns to the daily strategy sessions of the Obama campaign. Instead of choosing one strategy at the expense of the other, Democratic candidates should find managers that have the ability to do what the two World Series managers, Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers and AJ Hinch of the Houston Astros, did in managing their teams. However, the best way to handicap the next presidential election might be to look beyond the potential candidates’ policies and personalities and check out their choice of campaign managers and their strategies.