Shortly after the Associated Press and the broadcast networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden, the Washington Nationals sent out a Tweet. “We look forward to hosting President-Elect Biden on Opening Day of the 2021 season.”
Today, as President Trump and his allies press his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in an effort to overturn the election’s results, this six-day-old statement remains one of only two acknowledgements by a Major League Baseball team that Biden won the election and will serve as the 46th president of the United States, according to New York magazine.
The only other MLB club to acknowledge this reality is our former hometown team, the Baltimore Orioles, whose CEO John P. Angelos said in a statement Monday that the Orioles “support President-Elect Biden and his team in their efforts to confront the urgent pandemic and economic problems that face our society and the world as we unite against common challenges and look ahead in the collective interest of all Americans.”
“It’s difficult to find American institutions that have not accepted that Biden defeated Donald Trump to become the president-elect of the United States outside of (currently elected) members of the Republican Party,” New York reported. “But you sure can find them in sports.” The bulk of professional sports teams—not just in MLB, but in the NFL and the NBA—have remained silent on the outcome of the election, according to New York.
Our current and former hometown teams have been the exception. “The Orioles and the Nationals are owned by the Angelos family (famously considered the most liberal in all of baseball) and the Lerners (who explicitly asked not to be seated next to Trump at the World Series in 2018),” New York reported.
But in addition to the baseball teams, the Washington Mystics congratulated Biden, posting a message to the club’s official instagram account: “We look forward to hosting [Biden] & @kamalaharris at a Mystics game in the future!”
Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the city’s levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregory’s ouster as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, the collapse of Washington’s Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.
