Let’s see if that headline works as clickbait. 🙂
Racism is still alive and well in baseball
A quick followup from yesterday’s post about MLB “recognizing” the Negro Leagues. Craig Calcaterra goes into more detail about how, even though the color line was broke in 1947, the damage from baseball’s racist policies continued and still has effects on the game today:
MLB’s skimming off of only a small handful of superstars in the 1940s and 1950s, while shunning the vast majority of its players and workers, was enough to crater the Negro Leagues as a business, leading to their destruction and leading to the end of countless on-the-field and off-the-field baseball careers. It also led to a much, much slower and less comprehensive integration of the game than we may have otherwise gotten. That foot-dragging foreclosed the would-be careers of multiple generations of Black scouts, coaches, managers, and executives which, in turn, foreclosed the sort of intergenerational role modeling and mentoring which would’ve led to a greater number of Black scouts, coaches, managers, and executives than we have in the game today. Which is to say that even if the sort of racism that motivated MLB’s failure to properly assess the worth of the Negro Leagues back in the 40s and 50s is not apparent in the game now, the legacy inspired by that racism persists.
Craig writes a newsletter on Substack called “Cup of Coffee,” and this is from today’s free edition. Check out the whole thing if you’re interested in a different take on baseball, sports, and everything else. If you like it, subscribe!
Trolling for a pardon
A group of state attorneys general led by Texas’ Ken Paxton filed an antitrust suit against Google, alleging the company “used its monopolistic powers to control pricing” https://t.co/Y4bGD4rfVy
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 16, 2020
It’s hard to argue (unless you work there, I suppose) that Google might be a just a tad too big these days and that antitrust laws ought to be brought to bear before they (along with Amazon and Facebook) have effectively taken over commerce. But I’d feel a lot better about this lawsuit if it wasn’t being led by the same guy who did this a few weeks ago:
Texas AG Ken Paxton just announced a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate presidential election results in 4 key swing states. https://t.co/KDq86zgDKx
— CNBC (@CNBC) December 8, 2020
Paxton is under investigation for bribery and abuse of his office. He fired several of his senior staffers awhile back because they might have been collecting information for a whistleblower complaint. Between the nonsense lawsuit (which was quickly dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court because Texas had no standing to bring it in the first place) and now this salvo against Google (another frequent Trump target), it looks like Paxton is trying to show how deserving he is for a pardon. Which means I have some doubts about the legal competence behind this otherwise welcome investigation into the range of influence of one of the world’s most powerful corporations.