The day the ASG went down in Georgia

 Some beer vendor is gonna be out the rent money because of  baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. I guess that's the narrative now.

Some beer vendor, some small business owner, some ballpark worker, they're gonna be hurt because Major League Baseball is pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta. And maybe that's true. Maybe that has legs. 

What doesn't have legs is who's being blamed for this.

It's not MLB who'll be depriving some working folks of a payday, see. It's the Republicans in the Georgia statehouse, who put this whole thing in motion to begin with.

They're the ones you blame here, because they're the ones who passed the law that drove the All-Star game out of Atlanta. They're the ones who passed a raft of new voting regulations so blatantly targeting the voters who dared to reject Donald Trump last November you could only marvel at the gall of it.

It's not just that the new law is a solution in search of a problem, sweeping reform to ensure "free and fair elections" none of the bill's proponents thought was an issue until their guy lost. It that it's so obviously voter suppression in service to a power grab. 

If you can't beat 'em at the ballot box, move the ballot box farther away, provide fewer of them and take control of the process. That's the name of this tune.

It may not be precisely a wormhole back to Jim Crow, as the President and others have characterized it. But that's only because Georgia Repubs forgot to include poll taxes and literacy tests, no doubt an accidental oversight. Aside from that, Jim Crow's only a street or two over.

In response, Manfred decided his All-Stars didn't need to associate with these clowns. You can debate that moving the All-Star Game hurts some of the very people the new law targets, but you can't debate that MLB's heart is in the right place.

Maybe a better solution would have been to go ahead with the game and just let most of the players boycott it. Because a lot of them would. That way the beer vendors would get paid, but Atlanta wouldn't get any All-Stars to watch -- or Home-Run Derby participants, for that matter.

Then, on game night, send out a handful of select players to unfurl a banner that reads THIS "ALL-STAR GAME" BROUGHT TO YOU BY YOUR STATE LEGISLATORS. ENJOY.

Yes, sir. I think that has legs, too.