MLB has decided on an alternate site for the 2021 All-Star Game, according to multiple reports Monday night.
ESPN's Buster Olney first reported that MLB is "expected" to move the July 13 game to Coors Field in Denver, home of the Rockies, after announcing last week that the game was being moved out of Atlanta. Reports from other journalists that tracked with Olney's initial report later showed up on Twitter.
FAGAN: Surprising move by MLB to move All-Star Game
MLB is expected to announce the move Tuesday, according to multiple reports, including one by KOA Radio in Denver, the flagship station of the Rockies' radio network.
Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred announced Friday that baseball was pulling the All-Star Game and MLB Draft out of Atlanta and Truist Park in protest of sweeping changes to election laws in Georgia. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the legislation into law on March 25.
Critics of the changes say they are designed to suppress Black voters, who mostly vote for Democratic Party candidates. Kemp is a Republican, both houses of the Georgia Legislature are majority Republican and the state's top elections officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, are elected Republicans.
"Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box," Manfred said in his announcement.
Supporters say the changes are needed to ensure against voter and election fraud.
Former President Donald Trump, his lawyers and most of his supporters claim fraud is why he lost Georgia by 11,779 votes to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Raffensperger certified the election results following multiple recounts and wrote in January that investigators had "shown me that there is nowhere close to sufficient evidence to put in doubt the result of the presidential contest in Georgia."
Raffensperger, however, supports the newly enacted voting law.
Kemp and Republican U.S. senators and representatives responded to Manfred's announcement with calls for a boycott of the sport and threats to revoke baseball's century-old exemption from antitrust laws.
Coors Field has hosted an MLB All-Star Game once before, in 1998. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is a Democrat and the state House is Democrat-controlled, but the state Senate is Republican-controlled.
