Padres cancel dog tag giveaway after online petition

mpcincal · Apr 11, 2011

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/Padres-cancel-dog-tag-giveaway-hand-out-posters?urn=mlb-wp2987

Sunday was San Diego's first salute-the-military, camoflauge-wearing Sunday of the season, and the original plan was to give out dog-tag shaped trinkets with the Padres logo to kids, but the club nixed that after somebody started on online petition complaining about the connection between baseball and war. The petition itself got a whopping 146 signatures.

Most of the comments on there came out against the petition and against the Padres to some degree for caving in to the petition. What are the thoughts here?

YGBFKM · Apr 11, 2011

Baseball's no football.

Stitch · Apr 11, 2011

A bit silly to protest it that way. Kids, especially boys, will always be fascinated by the military and war in general.

PCLoadLetter · Apr 11, 2011

I'm surprised the Padres would cave like that. Given the military presence in San Diego, they had to figure the backlash would be 100 times worse than any criticism for connecting baseball and war.

Baron Scicluna · Apr 11, 2011

The ironic thing is, baseball was intricately connected to World War II, thanks to FDR's Green Light Letter to Landis. FDR said it was baseball's patriotic duty to continue.

DanOregon · Apr 12, 2011

I don't see what the big deal is. Haven't clubs given away child ID kits - just in case your kid gets kidnapped or goes missing and they need some DNA to ID the remains.
They would have been better off finding out where the dog tags were made (I'm guessing somewhere other than the USA) and protest on patriotic grounds.