Now even the sportswriters are getting into the act. Here’s CBS Sports.com’s national columnist, Mike Freeman, on the All-Star Game, scheduled to be played next season in Arizona:
The following scenario could actually happen. In America. In the 21st century …
It’s 2011 and the All-Star Game is just a few days away in Arizona. Albert Pujols decides to take a stroll in downtown Phoenix. A police officer drives by and doesn’t realize that Pujols is a baseball icon. To the officer, he looks potentially like an illegal alien. He is, after all, brown skinned.
Sure, that’s plausible — one of the most famous baseball players on the planet, a guy whose team, the St. Cardinals, regularly plays against the Diamondbacks, doesn’t get recognized on the street by a cop. Albert Pujols couldn’t walk a block in downtown Phoenix without getting mobbed by fans and autograph hounds, and this hypothetical cop is… a clueless racist.
Freeman continues his little fascist fantasy:
Pujols is stopped by the police. “Papers please,” the officer says. If Pujols somehow forgot to bring proof he’s an American citizen on his walk, then potentially off to jail he’d go.
Due to some of the most draconian immigration laws in the world, that scene could actually happen to Pujols (who became an American in 2007) or any number of other Latino baseball players who step foot in the state of Arizona.
This is why Major League Baseball should join other boycotters and pull the 2011 All-Star Game out of the state.
What’s happening in Arizona isn’t something from a science-fiction movie or 1930s Germany. It’s real and the sports world (especially baseball) might be drastically affected because of these laws in the months and years to come. Arizona should change its state motto from “God Enriches” to “Papers please.”
The new law gives police the right to stop, question and detain anyone “if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S.” Basically anyone who looks or sounds Latino is targeted by the law. It’s all very Fahrenheit 451.
Actually, Mike, it’s not, since Ray Bradbury’s great novel was about book-burning, not about rounding up perennial National League All-Stars and deporting them to Tierra del Fuego, or wherever. But please, continue. We’re all enjoying this:
Baseball is becoming the centrifuge of this increasingly heated argument, which is leaking into the sports world because one-third of the sport is Latino. There are also four managers, one general manager and an owner who are Latino.
I can tell you that MLB is closely monitoring the situation. It’s also clear this is an issue that could eventually resonate across the entire sports spectrum.
This is what many of you are going to say: “Sports leagues should stay out of politics.”
If you believe that’s what sports leagues do, then you live on a unicorn ranch.
It goes on and on from there. Over to you, unicorn ranchers, sports fans, connoisseurs of World War II movies and those who know where Tierra del Fuego is.
But let’s let Mike have the last word:
If you hate me using Pujols as an example, insert any Latino baseball player or someone else. It could happen to you.
Happen to you? It couldn’t even happen to Albert Pujols.
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