Yes, MLB moved the All-Star Game. But history shows it can do lots more for voting rights.

All eyes are on the Major League Baseball All-Star Game this week, but those eyes are on Denver and not Atlanta after MLB moved the game in response to the new draconian voting law in Georgia. It was smart for baseball to take a stand during a period of national conversation on the right to vote, but there is so much more it can do to stand up for our democracy.

The interplay between baseball and voting rights has a long history. The women’s suffrage movement benefitted greatly from political activism within baseball. There were women’s baseball teams in the 1860s and 1870s, and several suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, played the game. On May 18, 1915, the Chicago Cubs played the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in New York for a “suffrage game” in which spectators received suffrage literature and hand-held fans proclaiming, “be a suffrage fan.”

Baseball helped women get the vote

This campaign, coordinated with the votes for women baseball committee, was part of an effort to support the women’s suffrage referendum in New York in November 1915. Though that referendum failed, it was but a bump in the road toward the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which secured white women suffrage nationwide. (Black women, as well as Black men, had to wait to for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to achieve widespread access to the ballot.)

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Suffrage games occurred in many other places as well. Fred Clarke, the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, organized suffrage games and declared himself to be a “red hot suffragist.” “Women suffrage as I have seen it has a good batting average and mighty few errors in its record,” he said.

Even the most famous song involving baseball, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," has a link to women’s suffrage. In 1908, lyricist Jack Norworth wrote the words to the song for Trixie Friganza, an actress with whom he was having an affair. Friganza was a major player in the women’s suffrage movement, attending rallies and donating to suffrage organizations.

Baseball is also linked to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Much like he was a significant force on the baseball field, Jackie Robinson was also a key player in the civil rights movement. He attended the "March on Washington" in 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Baseball used its platform in 2020 to assist in election administration during the pandemic. As states looked for larger polling places that could accommodate social distancing, the Los Angeles Dodgers and other MLB teams stepped up to the plate to offer their stadiums. Teams also engaged in get-out-the-vote campaigns, such as the New York Mets' “Ya Gotta Vote” campaign that plays off of its popular slogan, “Ya Gotta Believe.”

And now, in 2021, the MLB moved the All-Star Game after Georgia enacted a partisan voting law in response to the Big Lie – the false claim that Democrat Joe Biden did not rightfully win the 2020 election. The new law will make it harder for many people to vote. It offers less time to vote absentee, imposes new voter ID requirements, and reduces the availability of ballot drop boxes. It targets voting conveniences used most often by urban, disproportionately minority voters. President Biden called it “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

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In moving the All-Star Game to Colorado, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said it was “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport,” and that baseball “fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” The change of venue to the Colorado Rockies stadium is itself symbolic. Colorado has some of the most convenient voting rules in the country, with consistently high turnout.

World Series of Voting contests

But now it’s time for baseball to go further and use its platform to actively support our democracy. There should be voter registration opportunities when buying tickets and entering a stadium – not just as an election approaches. Teams can have competitions to see who can register the most voters, culminating in a World Series of Voting as the deadline approaches. Fans can be offered educational material on upcoming elections.

Players can become democracy champions, recording public service announcements that can air during games on television and on the jumbotron at the stadium. Teams can work with local election officials to recruit poll workers. The league should hire a democracy ambassador whose focus is to implement these strategies.

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None of this is partisan. MLB should not care who votes so long as everyone has an equal opportunity to participate. All of it can help improve voter turnout.

Baseball took a good first step in punishing Georgia for its new restrictive voting rules and rewarding Colorado for its strong approach to democracy. But to really hit a home run, it must do more. Baseball may be the American pastime, but so is voting.

Joshua A. Douglas is a law professor at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law and the author of "Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting." Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaADouglas

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Beyond All-Star Game: MLB history shows many ways to champion voting