ATLANTA — The announcement Thursday that Major League Baseball is awarding the 2025 All-Star Game to Atlanta and Truist Park is welcome news throughout Smyrna, Cobb County and the rest of metro Atlanta.
But people are wondering why MLB changed its mind about Georgia, when the controversial state election law that provoked MLB to pull the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta has not changed; it’s still on the books.
Rep. Teri Anulewicz (D - Smyrna), whose district includes Truist Park and the residents who live in that area, said MLB has told no one why.
“The law actually hasn’t changed,” Anulewicz said Thursday evening.
But she said everyone is glad that MLB changed its mind.
She said some of the biggest opponents of Georgia’s election law are also the biggest opponents of boycotts which, she said, change nothing, but do hurt residents and small business economically.
“All the folks who work in any of these businesses, the hospitality industry, Truist Park, that’s who really had to pay the price for the All-Star Game leaving,” she said. “I think it's wonderful that what (MLB) is doing is really correcting something that happened during a very heated time. But I think that they made the right choice to bring the All-Star Game back to Atlanta.”
On social media, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp wrote, “Georgia’s voting laws haven’t changed, but it’s good to see the MLB’s misguided understanding of them has.”
Georgia Sec. of State Brand Raffensperger wrote, “In the longest instant replay review of all time, MLB’s head office finally overturned a bad call.”
Raffensperger points to a University of Georgia study of the 2022 midterm elections in Georgia that found that the election law helped, not hurt, voters in general - and Black voters in particular. For example, zero percent of Black voters surveyed said they had had a bad voting experience.
The president of the Georgia and Atlanta NAACP, Gerald Griggs, credits massive get-out-the-vote mobilizations by his organization and others, not the law.
“The law was not responsible for easing the ability to get to the ballot,” Griggs said Thursday. “It didn't make it easier to vote. It made it harder to to access the franchise, which we've now had to mobilize against... Major League Baseball and the Braves need to get on the right side of history. And I think it sends the wrong message to individuals who want to suppress people's constitutional rights to have their choices heard at the ballot.”
As it is, federal lawsuits against Georgia’s election law are still pending in the courts, while the All-Star Game is again on its way to Atlanta.