![]() To the frustration of some players, baseball was quiet when the former San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016, eliding the space between sports and politics and igniting a conservative backlash as then-presidential candidate Trump seized on the quarterback’s protest against police brutality and racial injustice. “We always have tried to be apolitical,” the commissioner, Rob Manfred, claimed to reporters at the 2021 World Series. Though it has spent millions of dollars lobbying Washington over the years, Major League Baseball long fancied itself above the partisan fray. A diversity advocate who hired MLB’s first female coach, Kapler has an image of Martin Luther King on his Twitter feed and posts as often about social justice as about balls and strikes. In 2014 he wrote a post on his lifestyle site extolling coconut oil as a moisturiser, mouthwash and masturbatory aid. His move, coming after the Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays used their social media channels last Thursday to post facts about gun violence rather than game updates, catapulted America’s most staid major sports league, and one of its most unconventional personalities, into the middle of a deeply contentious political issue.īorn in Hollywood, the tattooed and bespectacled son of a piano teacher, Kapler loves Scotch and steak and wears a broken watch, an ESPN profile noted this month. ![]() The home of the brave should encourage this.” The 46-year-old added: “I am not OK with the state of this country … when you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. “Every time I place my hand over my heart and remove my hat, I’m participating in a self-congratulatory glorification of the ONLY country where these mass shootings take place.” “I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents,” he wrote. Rather than resort to memes, insults and straw-man arguments after 19 children and two teachers were killed at a Texan elementary school, he posted a 700-word essay on his blog explaining his decision to stop standing on the field for the pregame national anthem. Kapler, meanwhile, was hired as the San Francisco Giants’ manager in late 2019 after a stint in charge of the Philadelphia Phillies.
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