ATLANTA — Each of the next three days, a baseball stadium will dim its lights, thousands of people will illuminate the flashlights on their phones and they will engage in a wildly ahistorical, fundamentally problematic and altogether unnecessary ritual.
On Tuesday, Major League Baseball delivered a weak, mealy-mouthed affirmation of the chop, a staple at Atlanta Braves games, which relied on canyon-sized gaps of logic and epitomized the tail wagging the dog.
Which is, of course, something destined to go away, like the former Washington Football Team name, the Chief Wahoo logo and countless other examples of Native American imagery in sports.
Manfred was referring to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a North Carolina-based tribe with whom the Braves say over the past year and a half they’ve “developed a cultural working relationship …
This week, Richard Sneed told the Associated Press: “I’m not offended by somebody waving their arm at a sports game.” He went on to say that the chop is “the least of our problems,” compared to crime and poverty in the indigenous community, as if getting rid of the chop and obviously deeper, more important issues are somehow mutually exclusive.
Even if we were to accept Manfred’s supposition that local tribes approved of the chop, the notion that only tribes within a three-hour radius of Atlanta are worth listening to is specious when the game is being broadcast to a national audience.
Five years later, more than 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly removed from Georgia and banished to the Trail of Tears, the nine-state, 1,200-mile walk to their new land in Oklahoma.
For years, the tribe has had signage on the left-field wall at American Family Field to market its casino — except for when the Braves or Cleveland Indians came to town, as Atlanta did in this year’s division series.
Six months ago, MLB practiced those principles when it yanked the All-Star Game from Atlanta over the Braves’ vociferous disagreement after the backlash against more restrictive voting laws in Georgia.
And so the chop continues to exist only because it started in 1991 and coincided with a glorious part of the franchise’s history, the boom decade in which the Braves won a championship and started a run of 14 consecutive division titles.
Years of pressure mounted, Cleveland recognized the necessity of a name change, and thus began a transformation that everyone will grow used to sooner than later.
He wore a headdress and danced on the pitcher’s mound and huddled in a teepee and celebrated home runs with smoke signals and breathed fire.
More than 35 years ago, the Atlanta Braves recognized something was wrong and remedied it.
But it would, to plenty, return at least a modicum of dignity to a people that have already had so much taken from them.
They go to watch the team they love, chop or no chop, and anyone who loves chopping more than Ronald Acuña Jr., Freddie Freeman and Ozzie Albies clearly has bad taste anyway.
That noise you hear this week emanating from Truist Park will sound like the tomahawk chop, but in reality it will mark the beginning of its death rattle.