We’ve seen this before, the statue stealers, the attempt to change history, the stupidity that exists in the reasoning of such things. Well, there is more. This is probably a story you didn’t read about, as I haven’t until it was recently brought to my attention by a colleague of mine.
Did you even know there was a baseball commissioner’s name on the annual MVP Award by each league in the MLB? Chances are you didn’t know that, as I really didn’t. Though I’ve seen the award before, alas, there is or was someone’s name on it. Yes, for more than 75 years this is the way it was on this award.
The Baseball Writers themselves named the award after Kenesaw Mountain Landis, after he chose them to select the MVP for baseball after there was many different awards being handed out by various outlets. (On the link to the AP News Story about this, MLB historian John Thorn offers up his personal feelings about Confederate statues as well) Now all of a sudden in this ‘age of enlightenment’ and age where countless usually liberalized minds who think alike and were shaped by an incessant need to think that ‘they’ are the enlightened ones and the righters to every wrong that they perceive to have been done. I can see changing an Award honorary name if their name is no longer relevant to the modern-day, or maybe updated, but to use this reasoning to do this is nothing more than a political ploy of stupidity.
It’s the award of the BBWAA anyway which leads to some interesting suppositions about that organization to say the least, but I won’t even go there. This was all spearheaded by a very small man, a baseball writer, who likes to wear bow-ties and has a political ax to grind by the name of Ken Rosenthal. He’s the ‘gritty like’ weasel that pops out of dugouts to give us snippets and interviews on tv (pre-Covid) of course, so we didn’t have to put up with his whining this year. In print or on twitter anyway, he likes to be the one who tweets out info first, it’s a little game the baseball writers really love to let us know about… “First tweeted by….insert name here” But here’s his latest accomplishment.
The baseball commissioner’s name that was on the award was Kennesaw Mountain Landis, I don’t know much about his life other than reading that he was the first baseball commissioner and served from 1920 to 1944. Landis was also a federal judge, and was instrumental in keeping baseball on the straight and narrow after the ‘Black Sox Scandal’. The reasoning for stripping Landis of his place in baseball history by having his name on an award that is given out by the BBWAA is steeped in the hotbed of the moment, now in the year 2020 Baseball Writers of America have deduced that Landis did nothing to integrate people of color into baseball at that time, so he shouldn’t be on their award. All of a sudden in this time of glorious enlightenment bestowed on these writers which 89 percent agreed with, in the year 2020. Imagine that the baseball writers, dragging a federal judge who was born in 1866 through a muddy field and proclaiming that he was a ‘racist’. Wow, this country has a lot of issues, and this is nothing more than a cry for attention by a writer who is steeped in liberalism such as Rosenthal is.
Statement from BBWAA President Paul Sullivan on discontinued use of Kenesaw Mountain Landis name for MVP awards, beginning in 2020. pic.twitter.com/ta6EvPZyIs
— BBWAA (@officialBBWAA) October 2, 2020
How did this specific group of writers gain so much special reasoning? In their own minds and actions, righting every wrong that they perceive to have happened in the history of baseball and acting upon it. Wow, they must really think so highly of themselves. A baseball scribe with a conscious, what a marvelous thing. He enlisted support from somewhat recent MVP award winners as well. Apparently Terry Pendelton, and Barry Larkin who said,
“His name should not be represented on a plaque or award of honor, especially at this day and time. If his name was taken off, I would not be opposed to it at all.”
It doesn’t stop there, the writers have enlisted these HOF players to side with them, our own favorite 3rd baseman, Mike Schmidt, who among Phillies fans holds high regard although some didn’t always side with him with what he did on the baseball diamond for the team. Schmidty stated that “If you’re looking to expose individuals in baseball’s history who promoted racism by continuing to close baseball’s doors to men of color, Kenesaw Landis would be a candidate.” That’s a really interesting statement by Schmidt being that he was born in 1949, well past the time when Landis was the Baseball Commish.
Yes, the writers chose a person to pick on and single out that’s been dead for longer than most of them have been alive. This shows what kind of mentality we’re dealing with in this country now, a time for a closer look into what is something that definitely has deeper roots in looking for blame for things long past, and mainly things that don’t exist anymore. A look at the makeup of the ethnicities of the baseball writers themselves may be more of a modern story they perhaps should be writing about. They do have deep troubles within themselves, that is for sure.
