MLB, MLBPA Sued for More Than $1B over Relocation of 2021 All-Star Game

A group of small business owners are suing Major League Baseball and baseball's Players Association for $1.1 billion in damages and is hoping the courts will return the 2021 All-Star Game to Atlanta following MLB's decision to relocate the game in April. 

According to Jonathan Stempel of Reuters, the business owners filed a complaint on Monday night through the Job Creators Network representing the cohort. 

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced the game was being pulled from the Atlanta area after Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a law restricting voting rights within the state.

"MLB robbed the small businesses of Atlanta—many of them minority-owned—of $100 million, we want the game back where it belongs,” President and CEO of the Job Creators Network Alfredo Ortiz said in a statement. “This was a knee-jerk, hypocritical and illegal reaction to misinformation about Georgia’s new voting law which includes Voter-ID."

The suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks $100 million in damages for businesses and $1 billion in punitive damages. Both Manfed and MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark are listed as defendants. 

The full complaint can be read here. 

In the wake of MLB's decision to remove the All-Star Game from Atlanta, the CEO of Cobb Travel and Tourism said the state was missing out on $100 million in estimated lost economic impact. Yet those numbers are often in dispute, as Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson told Bryan Armen Graham of The Guardian in April:

"“The rule of thumb that I always tell everyone is just take whatever number the boosters are telling you, move the decimal one place to the left and you’ve probably got a pretty good guess. We’ve actually gone back and looked at data for cities that have hosted All-Star Games and Super Bowls and Olympic Games and events of that scale, and we always come up with numbers that are a fraction of what the numbers that were predicted ahead of time.”"

Charlotte sports economics professor Craig Depken told Graham recent studies of the last two MLB All-Star Games in Texas showed the net impact of the event on the local economy was "essentially statistically zero." 

The 2021 All-Star Game will take place at Coors Field in Denver on July 13.