Once again, we see baseball just getting a little too cute.  As a long-time fan, I want the game the way it was, i.e. double plays and no woke!  

Down in Tampa, the Rays have a wonderful young team.  They compete with the high payroll squads and do so well.  The Rays were the 2020 short-season AL champs and won 100 games in 2021.  Tampa has a baseball future, to say the least.

So, what do you do when your young team is super exciting?  I would talk baseball 24/7 and encourage the fans to show up and cheer.  There are probably millions of baseball fans around who'd wish for a team like that.

So what did they do in Tampa?  Someone decided to go woke, did not check with the fans, and Governor Ron DeSantis reacted with his pen:   

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) vetoed $3.1 billion in spending as he signed a $109.9 billion budget Thursday, slashing funds that would have, in part, gone toward a youth sports complex earmarked as a possible spring training facility for the Tampa Bay Rays.

The Republican cited the need to protect the state "against what very well may be a Biden-induced recession" at the signing ceremony. The facility in question, in Pasco County, would have cost $35 million. The veto comes after the Rays published a call to end gun violence in the aftermath of the Texas and New York mass shootings, and a report from OutKick said it learned that the decision was indeed in response to the team "politicizing" the massacres.

The Rays did politicize the Uvalde shooting by getting woke cute.   You can do a minute of silence and express your support for the families without getting woke about it.

When is baseball going to stay out of politics?   It's not the business of a baseball team to go woke by turning its support for the victims into another misleading attack on assault weapons.  If you do then there are consequences.

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Image: Tampa Rays