Baseball In Arizona: To Play Or Not To Play

Last week Major League Baseball got tossed straight into the middle of the Arizona brouhaha. Adrian Gonzalez of the San Diego Padres told FanHouse, an online sports magazine, that he will not attend next year's All-Star Game in Phoenix if the new immigration law is in effect, and he wants MLB to boycott spring training in Arizona. "I'll support the Players Association 100 percent," said Gonzalez, who has dual citizenship in Mexico and the U.S. "If they leave it up to the players and the law is still there, I'll probably not play in the All-Star Game. {I}t's a discriminating law.”

 Even before Gonzalez spoke out, rumblings could be heard from various corners of the baseball field. Sportswriter Dave Zirin called for an Arizona boycott by MLB, and has ceased covering the Arizona Diamondbacks. White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen decried the new law. And when the Diamondbacks arrived in Chicago for a four-game series against the Cubs last week, they were greeted by protesters outside Wrigley Field.

On Mike and Mike in the Morning, the two hosts started a discussion on the controversy last Friday that’s still going on this week, inviting viewers to email their opinions. Comments were all over the map, and, as usual, a goodly portion devolved into rudeness and personal attacks. M&M took the high road, presenting both sides of the issue, and doing their best to maintain a tone of civility. Not surprisingly, a majority of viewers claimed baseball isn’t political and should just stay out of the whole thing; their attitude is let Congress stay out of baseball (as in steroid use) and baseball will stay out of Congress. I can understand the sentiment, but I agree with Dave Zirin that baseball already is political – as is the whole wide world of sports. Zirin says he wrote his latest book, A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play,  precisely to show how powerfully sports and politics have interacted over the centuries, despite denial of the connection from both sides.

The thing is, the Arizona law is probably more relevant to baseball than almost any other issue: more than 28 percent of players come from outside the United States. Hispanics (including American born) make up almost 30 percent of ball players overall. Picture it: Mariano Rivera, wearing street clothes during down time at the All-Star game, is strolling down the streets of Phoenix in search of an ice cream cone, when he’s stopped by a cop asking, “Papers please?” I can imagine it happening, and it makes me sick. I don’t know if anyone in MLB has thought about the potential for this kind of player humiliation. But Jesse Jackson has: in a letter to Bud Selig urging a boycott of Arizona he says,  “Imagine if players or their families are stopped and interrogated by law enforcement...That would truly be a dark day for Major League Baseball.”

On the other hand, boycotting the All-Star game might not be that meaningful, considering all the Spring Training in Arizona. It’d probably be too complicated to move that somewhere else. Besides, the All-Star game is more than a year away; who knows what will happen by then? The law could be ruled unconstitutional and barred from implementation. Or Congress might get off its ass and come up with a better solution to the immigration conundrum. It seems to me that Major League Baseball doesn’t have to put itself out there for target practice this early in the game. As former Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said on the Mikes program, Bud Selig shouldn’t respond yet, but just wait and “take the pitch.”