Sports fans are holding all 62 cowardly teams in Major League Baseball and the National Football League hostage, leading to the "blacklisting" of disfavored athletes, writes Minneapolis Star-Tribune sports columnist Patrick Reusse. He also implies that fans who are disenchanted with controversial athletes have no right to play the "I'm offended" card.
Reusse, nominated last year for the baseball Hall of Fame as a writer, contends the leagues and their member teams are being held hostage to "a fraction of the billions that they might lose" from offended fans and have "shriveled in fear of the noise." He compares adverse fan reactions (note photo of fans angry with NFL for allowing protests last season) to and "blacklisting" of NFL free agents Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid and Oregon State University pitching prospect Luke Heimlich, passed over by every MLB team in the 2017 and 2018 baseball drafts.
"In the NFL, quarterback Colin Kaepernick and safety Eric Reid have been blacklisted over what originally were accepted as non-disruptive protests during the pregame national anthem," writes Reusse. As for Heimlich, he is allegedly being "blacklisted" by MLB for molesting his niece six years ago when he was 15 and she was six. As you'll read below, the girl surprisingly does not qualify for #MeToo status.
Also, Reusse wrote: "My view is that major league sports leagues and teams — which have fed gluttonously at the public trough — should be expected to take fair-minded stands, even when those might cut into profits." He says a sports team or league, like an "independent" news room, should take stands no matter the cost of lost business revenue.
Let's get real. With precious few exceptions, on nearly every social or political issue, the Star-Tribune and nearly every other major metro daily paper will take the progressive side of the debate. Fair-mindedness and independent thinking are not part of their equations. Left-stream media get to be autocratic; sports team owners do not. Groups favored by the Left can claim they're offended, but football fans cannot:
"As never before in my lifetime, the notion that employers are allowed to be autocratic in their demands of employees seems popular. That’s what I’ve heard when offering Kaepernick opinions in the past — that he’s representing his company, and therefore must accede to their wishes during the anthem.
"I don’t buy it. There is no obligation to stand for the national anthem. It is simply a courtesy that nearly all of us extend.
"I stand. Why not? I’ve never been stopped for Driving While Black."
Reusse writes that Kaepernick was not a distraction until the TV cameras found him, "and then fans started craning their necks to get a glimpse in order to be offended." Perhaps fans would have been offended sooner if broadcasters and writers more offended by "political patriotism" had reported the football players' outrageous behavior.
For those fans among you who watch "competent football players — Kaepernick and Reid — go unsigned in an obvious case of blacklisting, and you side with the money-grubbing, parasitic 32 NFL teams, you have given it all up to The Man." Never mind your stand for those who gave life and limb to the preservation of liberty. Ill-timed protests of "police brutality" and "racial inequality" take precedent over your homage to the "land of the free and the home of the brave."
This is also the land of the progressively biased media, personified by more liberal gibberish from Reusse:
"Blacklisting Heimlich isn’t a moral stand by MLB and 30 baseball organizations; it’s economic. They are afraid of the noise — just as Commissioner Roger Goodell and 32 NFL teams cowered in financial fear when the noisiest man in America, Donald John Trump, found a few silent anthem protests as an issue to make hay.
"Two leagues. Sixty-two teams. Cowards.
And countless media shilling for social justice warrior athletes.
