Tag: Major League Baseball

The story of the 2020 sports-strike-wave-against-racism is already one of both inspiration and cooptation. To have any sense of where this story might go, we need to understand why it detonated in the first place.

The 11th Annual Oakland International Film Festival opened at the Grand Lake Theater on April 4 with a myriad of dope narrative flicks and docs including “Watching Phoenix Rise,” “Mugabe: Villain or Hero” and the most popular movie in the festival hands down, “The Licks,” and thousands of cinema lovers in the audience.

Amidst the San Francisco Giants' parade festivities, Sergio Romo, the World Series hero, with a smile that could shame James Franco, parted his jacket to reveal a T-shirt that read, “I just look illegal.” The crowd erupted with joy. Just like in the ninth inning of the final game against the Detroit Tigers, Romo delivered the goods.

Afrika! Black people! Afrikans! Let’s do like China did and put the whole continent on lockdown by closing our doors to the rest of the world until we’re ready to come back out again as a superpower.

Bonds said nearly a decade ago: "I don’t need a headline that says, ‘Bonds says there’s racism in the game of baseball.’ We all know it. It’s just that some people don’t want to admit it." This is the story of the Black athlete today: Die a hero or live long enough to be a villain.

My T-shirt reads, “If Barry goes to jail, then baseball can go to hell!” An all-Black jury is seated to determine if Major League Baseball is guilty of running a profit-then-deny scheme by a bunch of lying, cheating racist ringleaders.

AT&T Park shook so hard I thought I was on a pogo stick the night Barry Bonds crushed a 3-2 Mike Bacsik pitch into right center to go past the great Hank Aaron and crown himself Major League Baseball’s all-time home-run king. He circled those bases to a deafening hometown roar.

Major League Baseball in alliance with Rawlings Sporting Goods moved their baseball factories to Costa Rica in the late 1980s, throwing thousands of Haitian women out of work. Its million dollar donation to Haiti earthquake relief should be measured against its long, exploitative relationship with the devastated nation and it should make a much more significant donation to help rebuild the nation from which it made so much money.