Burt Jones: Atlanta Braves deliver poetic justice to Stacey Abrams and Democrats

It was a banner year for the Atlanta Braves as baseball fans from across Georgia and the country cheered on our underdog team to their first World Series win since 1995.

The unifying power that sports bring to a community is unparalleled—bringing in people of all backgrounds. It’s this shared, common bond that should be celebrated and embraced.

CHAMPION BRAVES PLAN 2-PART PARADE CELEBRATING PAST, PRESENT

But while the Braves were focused on playing baseball, Democrats have been playing another game—politics.

After the 2020 election cycle in which we saw numerous irregularities and inconsistent changes to our elections in Georgia, as a member of the General Assembly, we passed the Election Integrity Act to secure our elections and restore confidence in the process. Among other things, we made commonsense, widely supported reforms to increase the number of early voting days to 19, to secure drop boxes, and to require identification for absentee ballot requests.

But even before they had read the bill, Stacey Abrams and far-left Democrats jumpstarted their fictitious spin machine, launching an all-out misinformation campaign to smear the bill—fabricating and amplifying lies to bully Georgia businesses into opposing the bill. In fact, Abrams herself got caught deceptively editing an op-ed she penned in which she directly called for a boycott of Georgia businesses over the election bill.

And it worked. In April, Major League Baseball caved and pulled the All-Star game from Truist Park based on Stacey Abrams’s lies. The MLB's decision was devoid of fact: it was based purely on the political lies of the polemic left. Small businesses lost out on a $100-million economic opportunity when they needed it most. Georgia residents—who overwhelmingly opposed the decision—lost out on a premier sporting event. And the Braves lost out on a chance to honor an icon in Hank Aaron at their ballpark.

But Atlanta and all of Georgia are resilient. Despite injuries to some of their best players, playing through the pandemic lockdowns, a .500 record through the first half of the season, and the MLB robbing them of the All-Star Game—the Braves never quit. They never gave up. And they never gave in. 

In the ultimate show of irony and poetic justice, the Braves brought home the World Series title. And to cap it all off—amid a bellow of boos—they received the trophy from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred himself, who just days earlier admitted to moving the All-Star Game for political purposes.

Through it all, despite the left’s efforts to divide fans and politicize the sport, the Braves brought Georgia fans, families, and businesses together. That’s the true spirit of the game, and that is where our focus should always be—not on injecting politics inappropriately to score political points.

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The only reason Democrats are pulling stunts like these like these is because they are losing on virtually every policy issue. Tax hikes, skyrocketing inflation, supply chain backlogs, wasteful spending, critical race theory, defunding the police, woke cancel culture—on issue after issue, the American people are tired of Democrats' divisive failure. 

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They want better schools, lower taxes, safer communities, and real solutions to the every day challenges facing our country—which is what Republicans in Georgia are focused on fighting for every day.

Georgians will never forget the Braves incredible season that culminated in a World Series Championship. But they’re also not soon to forget the setbacks they faced from the political ploys of Stacey Abrams. So much so that it could be a very, very good 2022 not just for the Braves—but for commonsense conservatism up and down the ballot in the Peach State.