“They probably see this as helping with the millennial and Gen Z audience they’ve desperately been trying to woo.”
I doubt that generations who grew up playing video games will get off very much on baseball, so I doubt that was the case.
More likely it was the (vastly overpaid, but ignorant) players bitching, the usual twitter-type mob threatening ‘boycotts’ (with most of them thinking that it’s racist/unjust to accuse blacks of stealing more bases than whites), and the implied/implicit threats to be ‘disruptive’ until MLB complied with moving the game out of Atlanta.
I’m not saying it will work. Nor am I saying that MLB came up with the idea on its own. Obviously this exists in the context of the reaction to the Georgia law.
But it’s a fact that MLB has been trying to attract a younger audience. Part of that has been considering significant rule changes to make games shorter (while still allowing plenty of time for ads). Part of that has been social justice nonsense.
People here love to blame the Democrats and the Left for applying pressure, and there is no doubt that they do that, but recently corporations and organizations have been rushing to go along with the latest social causes and one of the reasons for that is to make themselves appear hip and with it. We saw it with BLM. (Even with companies that were at no risk of being attacked by the mob.) We saw it with trannies. And this is just another instance.
Portraying it as innocent victims giving into leftist terrorists is cutting these guys slack that they no longer deserve. Increasingly, things are being run by people who either agree with the Left (due to schooling and social circles) or are more than willing to say whatever in order to appear hip and to sell to my generation (millennial) and younger. Gone are the days of a conservative business culture.