In the future, a baseball fan will be looking at a list of MLB All-Star Games and wonder what happened in 2021. The host city was supposed to be Atlanta, but it was moved to Denver.

He’ll read that the State of Georgia had passed a voting law that would all but end democracy. Republicans in the state were seeking to make it impossible for Democrats to win. They were targeting racial-minority voters and seeking to suppress their turnout. The basic right to vote was under threat.

The threat was so severe that the president of the United States got involved, pressuring MLB to move the game out of Atlanta. He said the law was “Jim Crow on steroids.”

MLB decided to move the game to a different city. Commissioner Rob Manfred said, “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” The MLB Players Alliance said, “We want to make our voice heard loud and clear in our opposition of the recent Georgia legislation that not only disproportionately disenfranchises the Black community, but also paves the way for other states to pass similarly harmful laws based largely on widespread falsehoods and disinformation.”

Then, in 2025, our curious baseball fan from the future will note, the MLB All-Star Game was played in . . . Atlanta. The same city in the state that had, according to the president of the United States, reinstated Jim Crow but worse only four years earlier.

What had happened in those four years? Georgia must have repealed the law, right? But it turns out that the stubborn Georgia Republicans left their racist, evil voting law in place anyway.

So that must have been it, then. Democracy in Georgia was over, Republicans would win everything forever, and no black people would be able to vote.

But in the very next year after the All-Star Game was moved, Georgia elected a black Democratic senator. The 2022 elections saw the highest turnout for a midterm cycle in Georgia history. Despite that, lines at polling places were short both for the primary and the general election. Early-voting turnout set records, with racial-minority early voting seeing a boost as well. Black-voter registration had been increasing for years and continued to increase. Zero percent of black voters in Georgia said they had a poor voting experience.

Wait a minute, our future baseball fan will think. A bunch of people, including the president of the United States, were completely wrong about a state law, MLB moved the All-Star Game out of that state in response, then put it right back there only four years later after the law turned out to be fine?

Pretty much.