Jack Flaherty speaks truth over lack of unity in MLB

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jack Flaherty bemoaned the lack of unity in the MLB.

Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2020, will go down as a day of historic protest with major sports leagues across the country choosing to cancel games in recognition of racial injustice. For MLB, there was little unity and a lot of frustration.

Jack Flaherty of the St. Louis Cardinals personified that discontentment for much of Thursday, taking to Twitter to express his disappointment with the league.

“Why is it so hard to do something unified for 1 day just 1 day,” Flaherty tweeted on Thursday morning.

Jack Flaherty’s tweets highlighted MLB’s inability to come together.

Flaherty tweeted more than that, but most of those tweets were deleted.

One tweet called out the league’s inability to produce some sort of cohesive response to the current unrest.

“Now you see why it wasn’t easy to make this a unified effort across the league…smh,” he said before deleting the tweet.

Another message compared MLB’s continuation of play with other leagues like the NBA.

“WE ARE THE ONLY SPORT PLAYING TODAY LET THAT SINK IN,” he said.

After deleting tweets which seemed to indicate frustration with his team pushing forward with their games on Wednesday and Thursday, Flaherty returned for some clarification.

“I also deleted my tweet about games being played today because it put my teammates in a bad position. we never discussed not playing because it wasn’t going to be league wide unified statement. I love these guys and we support each other. It was poor timing and my fault,” Flaherty wrote.

Flaherty has a point. The lack of a unified response from MLB put players in an awkward position with their teams. It wasn’t a good look for the league, especially in light of MLB’s struggles to put together a plan for the coronavirus-impacted 2020 season in the first place.

On Wednesday night, Flaherty wasn’t scheduled to pitch, but he and teammate Dexter Fowler sat out. The rest of the Cardinals went on to play, besting the Kansas City Royals, 6-5. The same scenario happened for Jason Heyward and the Cubs, who played in a 7-6 loss to the Detroit Tigers without the right fielder.

Some MLB games were canceled as the Brewers and Reds, Dodgers and Giants, Mariners and Padres, and Angels and Astros opted to sit out collectively.

With some players sitting, some teams playing and others sitting out, the lack of leadership from the top down in MLB has been on display.