The Tampa Bay Rays baseball team found itself embroiled in a bit of a political and public relations dilemma last week. To paraphrase what they no doubt say to their rookies, “Welcome to the big leagues of partisan politics.”
In what most probably consider to be a sincere gesture of solidarity with those rightfully horrified by the killing of 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket and 19 children and two teachers in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, the team said: “We all deserve to be safe — in schools, grocery stores, places of worship, our neighborhoods, houses, and America. The most recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde have shaken us to the core. The Tampa Bay Rays are mourning these heartbreaking tragedies that took the lives of innocent children and adults. This cannot become normal. We cannot become numb. We cannot look the other way. We all know, if nothing changes, nothing changes.”
The team then announced it would partner with an anti-gun violence group and donate $50,000 toward that cause.
Some likely felt that was a sign of the growing progressive posturing by corporate C-Suites. One person who may have felt that way was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who then zeroed out $35 million in the state budget that was intended to help fund a Tampa Bay Rays training facility.
“I don’t support giving taxpayer dollars to professional sports stadiums, period,” DeSantis declared. But he hinted at a bit of political payback, by adding: “It’s inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation.”
As with his stance against Disney’s woke policies, DeSantis has made it clear he will take on Florida corporations he believes are choosing political sides. The Tampa Bay Rays may have moved to the top of the list temporarily.
But let’s assume the Rays are sincere with their statement and their admonition to the rest of us not to become “numb” to mass shootings or to “look the other way.” In that spirit, I have a few questions for the team’s leadership and public relations advisers.
As The Chicago Tribune detailed last year, over the course of the past six decades, more than 40,000 men, women and children have been murdered in the city, and more than 100,000 wounded. Are the Tampa Bay Rays “numb” to those killings? Have they chosen to “look the other way” regarding that jaw-dropping murder rate?
Now, if the Rays leadership would care to extrapolate that number and timeframe across the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Trenton, Newark, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston and other large urban areas, they would discover — shockingly — that over 250,000 have been killed in our nation’s major cities and more than a million wounded.
Over the recent Memorial Day weekend, 51 people were shot in Chicago, and last July Fourth weekend, 108 people were shot there. The team didn’t release a statement about that. And Chicago’s murder rate ranked 28th among 65 major U.S. cities, according to FBI statistics for 2019, the latest year available.
Since the Rays chose to address the violence in cities as far away as Buffalo and Uvalde, one would think the seemingly endless shootings in Chicago would have attracted their attention. The loss of those innocent lives should have produced an equally moving statement of outrage and support from the team.
One should never assume in these cases but, hopefully, the violence in our major cities — many of them run by Democrats — is not being swept under the rug or ignored because of political correctness, because we don’t want to implicate the political party in charge at the moment, or because we don’t want to give “the other side” horrifying statistics to use in debates and tirades against us.
Maybe the tens of thousands of lives lost in major U.S. cities simply escaped the notice of the Tampa Bay Rays. So, let’s constrict the circle of violence closer to the Greater Tampa area.
In 2020, there were 1,285 murders in Florida — 165 more than in 2019 — and 80 percent of them were committed with firearms. There were nearly 5,000 more aggravated assaults in the state in 2020 than the year before, and 38 percent of those involved a gun. I looked for, but could not find, a statement from the Tampa Bay Rays regarding the violence and murders taking place in the Sunshine State.
Let’s constrict that circle of violence and murder even tighter. Since 2014, the city of Tampa’s homicide rate has been about 50 percent higher than the state and national averages, and about twice those rates in 2017 and 2021, the Tampa Bay Times reported. The number of homicides in Tampa in 2020 was the highest since tying that number in 2003, and the 48 homicides last year were the most since 1994. Yet, the city’s Major League Baseball team hasn’t issued a statement that I could find, saying “We cannot look the other way,” about the murders happening in their home city.
I pay attention to such “statistics” because during my childhood, I was counted among the inner-city poor. My family was evicted often, and I was regularly homeless. As a white child, I often lived in housing projects that were majority-minority. And during that time, I was blessed to discover that Black America is a great America. During those years, single Black moms working two to three jobs to support their children became not only my role models, but my enduring heroes.
Today, the urban poor — again, mostly minorities — have difficulty getting their voices heard in this country if they have no champions. Assaults, robberies, shootings and other crimes plaguing their neighborhoods apparently have become an inconvenience to liberal politicians and many mainstream media members. Everyone seems to be “numb” to that violence and “looking the other way.” Aren’t those who are killed in America’s major cities deserving of heartfelt statements from sports teams, corporations, politicians and others?
As we rightfully scream out in anger and anguish over mass killings — at least 33 have occurred in the U.S. since the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde — let us not forsake those who suffer in silence and obscurity because they have no voice or because the deaths of their loved ones evidently are not politically expedient.
Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration. His latest book is “The 56: Liberty Lessons From Those Who Risked All to Sign the Declaration of Independence.”