Major League Baseball is about to be completely anthem protest free.
Bruce Maxwell, the only Major League Baseball player to kneel during the national anthem this season, has been arrested on a gun charge.
The Oakland Athletics catcher allegedly pointed a gun at a female food delivery person in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Scottsdale police said officers went to Maxwell's home Saturday night after getting a call about a person with a gun. Maxwell was booked on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and disorderly conduct.
The media was quick to turn Maxwell into a hero.
But across Major League Baseball, there was no sign of protest. The end of the 2016 season came and went without a single player kneeling; nothing changed this year, either. Even the election of Donald Trump as president—a man who ran on a campaign of white nationalism and who has courted the support of white supremacists—did little to shake MLB out of its non-political stupor. Baseball, for all its talk of diversity and inclusivity and its promotion as America’s national pastime, seemed content to let the moment pass without saying something—anything—about racism or police brutality.
No longer. On Saturday night, as Trump’s latest incendiary commentson Kaepernick and protests, as well as the Golden State Warriors and Steph Curry, precipitated an outpouring of condemnation on social media and in the press, the Athletics’ rookie catcher Bruce Maxwell went to one knee during the national anthem before a game against Texas. MLB finally had its first anthem protester. It’s about time.
You can see why Maxwell was none too happy with the police. At least in retrospect.
After getting his name out there with his anti-American protest, Maxwell claimed to have been persecuted by a waiter.
Oakland A’s catcher Bruce Maxwell, 26, claimed this week that a waiter in his Alabama hometown of Huntsville refused him service after identifying him as the MLB player who took the knee during “The Star Spangled Banner” last month — only the waiter has a very different version of events and he told Fox News that was far from what went down.
“He is outright lying. This is really upsetting as he was given full service, I didn’t even know who Bruce Maxwell was,” Matt Henry, a 42-year-old waiter at Keegan’s Public House, told Fox News. “This all started because I carded his friend who wanted to order a beer.”
What a hero.