NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Major League Baseball will institute a change to one of the longest standing aspects of America’s pastime. Starting with the World Series, which will begin in just over a week, swinging and missing the ball three times in an at-bat will be called a “Trump Muslim Ban” instead of a “strikeout.”
“Baseball is a classic game and it has a culture that often cherishes tradition and heritage,” MLB Junior Deputy Spokesperson Carolyn Simpkins told reporters this morning, “but we’re also a business, and we also love to find new ways to draw fans in. We’ve instituted replay in certain contexts, expanded our Wild Card playoffs, and now we’re going to call strikeouts Trump Muslim Bans, or TMBs.”
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Simpkins said the inspiration for this development came when two federal district courts, one in Hawaii and one in Maryland, halting the implementation of President Trump’s highly controversial executive order that bans travel into the United States from six Muslim majority countries and North Korea. This is the third such time that a lower federal court has blocked Trump’s attempt to shape immigration with executive fiat. That triple failure, Simpkins said, is why MLB has made the name change.
“It just seemed like really great timing,” Simpkins said, “that in the middle of our postseason, Trump strikes out on his Muslim ban. Seemed like we’d be leaving an opportunity on the table by not capitalizing on this.”
This new terminology change will require stadiums that used to track strikeouts on their scoreboards and having fans put up big “K” letters on their outfield stands. Simpkins says that MLB will ship teams a few dozen plastic squares that have the letters “TMB” on them, and by the start of next year, they will require all teams to change any multimedia animations or ancillary media that refers to “strikeouts” to “Trump Muslim Bans.”
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MLB is considering several more updates to their lexicon, Simpkins told reporters. It’s not been decided yet which new terms will be rolled out, or when. However, she did preview what some upcoming changes might look like.
“Obviously we’ll be changing ‘wins and losses’ to ‘wins and Trump legislative agenda items,'” Simpkins said, “and we’re also thinking of renaming the Washington Nationals to the Washington White Nationalists while Trump’s in office, for relevancy’s sake.”
The White House did not comment on this story.
