Had The Fever And Had It Bad

Phyllis Schlafly is still not dead. The anti-feminist, anti-gay, racist conservative icon is still doing her thing at 91, most recently arguing that Major League Baseball should ban all foreign players because they’re taking jobs that should have gone to Americans.

Thanks all the same, Phyllis, but I’m happy I get to watch Bartolo Colon, Yoenis Cespedes, Wilmer Flores and Jeurys Familia playing in Flushing, Queens, USA. And Captain America agrees with me.

20533745778_84d66f1593_z — Immigrant Yoenis Cespedes threatens the livelihood of an American-born Orioles pitcher. (Photo by Keith Allison from Flickr)

(This is also why I say thanks, Obama, for helping to transform American policy toward Cuba: We need the pitching.)

Schlafly begins her argument by reminiscing about attending the 1944 World Series in St. Louis, about which, four things:

1. Only a truly awful person could start to tell you a story about watching Stan the Man play in the World Series just to pivot into a rant about foreigners ruining everything. Seriously, I’d love to hear even Phyllis Schlafly tell me about seeing a game like that, but her baseball stories don’t have any baseball in them, just more of the venomous hate she’s spewed for decades.

2. No coincidence that Schlafly’s idealized nostalgia for the good old days is pre-Jackie Robinson.

3. Rosters were so depleted during World War II that the ’44 series was more like a USO show than like a contest among baseball’s best, so this game was a particularly lousy example of baseball’s supposed Golden Age.

4. There were only 16 teams in the majors in 1944, compared to 30 today. Schlafly thinks her argument is against immigration because she’s a racist old bat, but what she’s really arguing against here is expansion.

But let’s get back to ignoring Phyllis Schlafly. We have more important things to think about, such as that on Thursday the Mets and the Nationals — two expansion teams — will meet for their first spring training games of 2016. Opening Day is just a month away.

So here’s something that should bring a smile to almost anyone who isn’t a hateful, soulless bigot: The 2015 Batting Highlights of Bartolo Colon.