Mighty Bernie at bat? Sanders makes pitch for minor leagues

[TexasTowelie]

BURLINGTON, Iowa — Take Bernie out to the ball game?

Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate, is aggressively opposing a Major League Baseball plan to cut 42 minor league teams across the country after 2020. Among the targeted are the Vermont Lake Monsters, the Single-A affiliate of the Oakland Athletics in his hometown, Burlington.

Defending low-profile ball clubs in far-flung places more fervently than anyone in the crowded Democratic presidential field allows Sanders to potentially win over a largely untapped 2020 constituency: baseball fans.

Sanders briefly took batting practice Sunday on an indoor turf field as representatives from three small-town Iowa teams looked on: the Quad City River Bandits, the Clinton LumberKings and the Burlington Bees, the local club in this town on the Mississippi River. In August, Sanders played softball with reporters on the state’s corn field-ringed “Field of Dreams,” the set of the Hollywood hit of the same name. And he has tapped a former Harvard second baseman, Faiz Shakir, to run his campaign.

Sanders shed his signature suit jacket to take swings in a sweater over a dress shirt. With a staff member slow-pitching, the senator dribbled a few grounders to his left, then lifted a ball in the air in the same direction, before joking that he was aiming another grounder off his bat at CNN reporter who should have dived to stop it. After about six hits, he dropped the bat and said “OK, that’s it.”

Read more: https://www.cheboygannews.com/zz/news/20191215/mighty-bernie-at-bat-sanders-makes-pitch-for-minor-leagues/1
(Cheboygan Daily Tribune)

[brooklynite]

1. July 2016: Mighty Bernie has struck out...

[George II]

2. What's ridiculous about this campaign issue he's self-created is that most of the teams....

....that might be "cut" (they won't, actually) are the lower level minor league teams and teams averaging 200-300 fans per game.

He complains about players being paid a "living wage", but players for those teams do so as a side job and many for recreation, they're not making careers out of short-season baseball players or players in the Rookie Leagues.

My father was an engineer in the 1950s, but twice a week drove over to New Jersey to play for a "semi-pro" team (that's what they called it back then) It wasn't his intention to support a wife and six children by playing two games a week for a few months a year. He did it because he loved playing baseball.

[NurseJackie]

4. It's a sign of desperation. The BS campaign is in deep...trouble...and they know it.

It's a sign of desperation. The BS campaign is in deep...trouble...and they know it. That helps to explain all of these manufactured "issues" and empty promises and impossible giveaways. Free college, debt forgiveness, cure AIDS, cure cancer, free healthcare, no taxes, save baseball, raises for everyone, free electricity, free Internet, free Disneyland, free pie, free cotton candy, rainbows every day!

All I'm saying is that most American voters are not so gullible and are much too smart for such game-playing, and this is why (in spite of promising everything to everyone) the BS campaign still holds firm at its previous polling ceiling.

[LanternWaste]

3. There was no joy in Mudville that night...

[TidalWave46]

5. "Sanders makes pitch for minor leagues"

Fabulous headline.