I’m sure there must be a reason, and maybe the question has already been asked and answered…
But why do some players/staff have both patches (“united for change” and “black lives matter”) and some do not? This, when all players are kneeling in unification and holding the black ribbon together. This was noticed during the pre-game for the Dodgers/Giants game on opening day.
I’m not one to judge political choices, or personal feelings, but this seems somewhat controversial to me.
As brand names themselves, players have every right to make or choose specifically NOT TO MAKE a political statement. To me, if you are willing to kneel during the pre-game, many kneeling during the anthem, you might not have an issue with wearing both patches.
Now, there are a thousand reasons why you might opt out of wearing at least one of those patches, I can think of 10 major reasons right now, and I don’t personally have any issues with what those patches stand for.
For instance, you might agree that Black lives matter, but not want to appear to support the organization that has the same name.
You might be a Blue lives matter supporter, and therefore don’t want to cause confusion with multiple political statements that may not be completely in harmony with each other.
You might have existing charitable efforts that don’t completely align with the politics of a statement like that. Many of these professional athletes have very robust charitable organizations and profiles.
You might feel the wearing of the patches may offend close friends or family.
There are dozens of other reasons it might make sense to not wear both.
I imagine that the MLB took a vote, at least from management about the patches. Certainly, the MLBPA (player’s association) weighed in too.
But I’d love to hear why some players, who are willing to kneel before the game in solidarity, wouldn’t also be willing to wear the patches.
Certainly, this doesn’t make them bad people, and it shouldn’t cause people to think differently of them, but it’d be nice to try to understand the concepts behind the lack of the patch.
Maybe they ran out of patches? Maybe their clean uniforms weren’t the ones with both patches?
Who knows? But I’d love to.