Baseball Takes ‘Step Toward Where It Should Be’ With All-Star Move

M.L.B. is not known for activism, but former stars say pulling the All-Star Game from Georgia honors the legacies of Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente and others.

Steve Blass pitched in parts of 10 seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He won a World Series title in 1971, earned an All-Star selection the following season and retired from the diamond a few years later. In many ways, he is representative of the average Major League Baseball player, based on his demographics. “I am,” Blass said in a phone interview on Monday, “a probably conservative, white, former baseball player that learned things that have become important to me by being in the presence of Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and a lot of those guys, and watching and admiring Henry Aaron, who embodied, I think, everything good in the game.” Case in point: After the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Blass watched his Black teammates, including Maury Wills, Stargell and Clemente, address the team and, in the absence of an M.L.B.-wide postponement, lead the Pirates in unanimously deciding to sit out an exhibition game and the first two regular-season games. It led other teams to take a similar stance, which resulted in a delay to the start of the M.L.B. season by a few days.