Reds left-handed reliever Amir Garrett knew he didn’t want to play Wednesday’s scheduled game vs. the Brewers. And hours before Thursday's doubleheader that was scheduled to make up that game, he wasn’t sure he could participate in those either.
In response to Sunday's police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., players on the Reds and Brewers decided to not play on Wednesday.
“These times are very trying, man. It’s tough,” Garrett said Thursday. “Every time I think about it, you get emotional and stuff like that, because we shouldn’t be in this position. We should not be here right now. It just sucks. [We] continue to talk about this over and over and over. It’s draining; it’s very draining. We’re in 2020 talking about racism and color. Like, we were supposed to be past this. The world is supposed to be a better place, but it’s just not.”
Garrett was on the field at Miller Park meditating Wednesday afternoon when he saw several Reds teammates, including Mike Moustakas and Wade Miley, having a long conversation with members of the Brewers, including Christian Yelich and Ryan Braun.
When Garrett eventually joined the group, Moustakas told him that the Brewers had decided to follow the lead of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks and not play as a protest over the events in Kenosha.
“I was contemplating not playing yesterday either, so it was like a weight off my shoulders when they said that,” Garrett said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s not play today.’ Especially for them, it’s in their backyard. It was right there what happened in [Kenosha]. I felt it was right, and we made a game-time decision that we both weren’t going to play, so that was it.”
Reds manager David Bell supported his players who chose not to play.
“For me, it comes back to my core values of respect, our team’s core values of respect,” Bell said. “I’m all for standing against anything for positive change, standing against anything that has to do with social injustice.”
Garrett noted the difficulties of being a Black man in America and said that many don’t understand what it feels like. He also realizes that people believe baseball players are paid to play and that’s it.
“I understand where they’re coming from,” Garrett said. “But as athletes, we have a really, really huge platform, and you don’t know what that platform may bring. You might have a lot of power. You might have a lot of people following you. You could turn a lot of heads. I get it, you make money. But you also have to understand that as an athlete, these people have to understand that when we make decisions, we’re OK with the decisions we are making. We understand that we’re sacrificing something, and you have to understand that as well.
“I know what it’s like to be poor and come up and earn everything I have received in my life. That’s a great feeling. I think about other people that are less fortunate than me, because that was me. I was down at the bottom. I was down at the bottom, so I will never forget where I came from. I can relate to all of these people because that’s my neighborhood. Those poverty areas, that’s my neighborhood that I came up from. You know what I mean? I’ve seen stuff like that. With my own two eyes, I’ve seen that.”
Since the May killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Garrett has had conversations with teammates about racial issues and social justice, and he is happy to educate them as much as possible.
Those conversations continued ahead of and after the postponement on Wednesday.
“My teammates have been very supportive, very open-minded as well.,” Garrett said. “It’s actually tough, because you’re taking other people out of their comfort zone, right? They may not want to speak up. They are getting out of their comfort zone a little bit, too, so you have to understand that as well. My teammates have been good through this whole process, man. As I always say, you may not agree on a lot of stuff, but you still respect each other, and you still love each other because we’re still a team. We might have different views, but at the end of the day, these are my brothers and I love these guys.”