The Toronto Blue Jays have cut pitcher Anthony Bass just over a week after he apologized for sharing a video on social media that encouraged Christians to boycott Bud Light and Target. 

The decision was based mostly on performance, but “distraction” did play a role, according to Blue Jays manager Ross Atkins. Bass had previously apologized for sharing a video on Instagram that made a Biblical case against spending money to support businesses that are pushing people, particularly children, to “darkness.”

“There’s a myriad of variables,” Atkins said. “Performance is usually the driving one and performance was a large aspect of this decision. Distraction was a small part of it and something we had to factor in.”

“We’re trying to build the best possible team we can build,” Atkins said. “This was a baseball decision to make our team better.”

Bass did not comment on the video he shared, but later released an apology where he said he was sorry for the “hurtful video.”

“I recognize yesterday I made a post that was hurtful to the Pride community, which includes friends of mine and close family members of mine. And I am truly sorry for that,” he said in a video put out by the team. 

“I just spoke with my teammates and shared with them my actions yesterday. I apologized with [sic] them, and as of right now I am using the Blue Jays’ resources to better educate myself to make better decisions moving forward,” he added. “The ballpark is for everybody. We include all fans at the ballpark. We want to welcome everybody. That’s all I have to say.”

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On Thursday, Bass seemed to backtrack from the apology, telling reporters that he stood by his beliefs. 

“I stand by my personal beliefs,” he said. “And everyone is entitled to their personal beliefs, right? Also, I mean no harm towards any groups of people.”

Bass, who had been designated to participate in the first pitch for a“Pride Weekend” game in Toronto, said he did not believe that the video he shared was hateful. In the aftermath of the apology, the 35-year-old pitcher has been booed by home fans. 

Bud Light has faced plummeting sales in the aftermath of a partnership with transgender-identifying activist Dylan Mulvaney while Target has faced backlash over its LGBT-themed products for children and “tuck-friendly” female swimwear. 

The following is the opening satirical monologue from “The Andrew Klavan Show.”

You know, every now and then, I think it’s important to step back from the hurly-burly argle-bargle of political jingle-jangle and take a looky-shnooky at the stinking-thinking of the other sidey-widey.

After all, no one is correct all the time. Sometimes, we on the political Right can become so passionate about preserving our inherited liberties that we overlook the legitimate concerns of demonic hellspawn who want to slaughter babies and sexually mutilate children while at the same time replacing the capitalist engine of free societies with a socialist system that has reduced civilizations to rubble and slavery wherever it’s been tried.

Surely, these leftists have SOMETHING to contribute to our national life. Tie-dyed t-shirts are very nice for instance. Especially if you wash your car by hand and need something to dry it off with. Leftists have also liberated women from the restricted existence of homemaking and motherhood so they can explore a wider world of almost infinite regret and depression. And what about rap music and hip-hop? Without rap’s monotonous rhythms, foul-mouthed lyrics, crappy values and misogyny, we’d have no other way to degrade the lives of black people except welfare and the public school system? So… that’s a Left wing contribution too.

Anyway, in order to bring Americans together… with leftists… I sometimes like to explore those areas where Right and Left can find common ground.

One example? Both Right and Left understand that free speech is one of the foundational values that uphold American liberty. Indeed, leftists are so committed to preserving their freedom of speech that if anyone else tries to speak, they immediately set out to stop them.

In addressing free speech, the Left has three main areas of concern.

One. Book Banning. Let’s say a few small-minded parents force an elementary school to remove a perfectly reasonable book of homosexual pornography from the library’s lower shelves and put it on a higher shelf where only third graders can reach it. This is what the Left calls book banning, and it must be opposed in the name of free speech and homosexual pornography. In the same way, when Ryan Anderson wrote a book in opposition to the transgender movement, Left wing activists selflessly took time out from threatening the lives of Matt Walsh and his family to insure Amazon dropped Anderson’s book from their store — which, of course, is NOT book banning because you can still get Anderson’s book in any dark alley where books are sold by people trying to avoid being assaulted by Left wing activists.

Two. Misinformation. Now of course, to most of us, “Misinformation” is just the harmless winner of a beauty contest where bearded women with penises parade onstage in tuck-friendly bikinis. But no, misinformation is actually a serious problem and it must be suppressed in order for free speech to thrive. During the last presidential election, for instance, when Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed a network of Biden family corruption that possibly reached to candidate Joe Biden himself, now-secretary of state Antony Blinken arranged for over fifty former CIA spies to tar the laptop as Russian misinformation and, with the help of a vigilant news media, that Russian misinformation was suppressed before anyone could find out it was true. So you can see why the Left feels it’s very important to suppress misinformation. If it’s true.

Finally, three, violence. Now there is some speech the Left believes should not be free, and that is speech that is actually violence. Right wing speech, for instance, is violence. You can tell Right wing speech is violence because whenever Right wingers try to speak, Left wingers physically attack them. Now you may say: but wait, that’s Left wing violence. Ah ha, but you see, violence is how the Left expresses itself, so their violence is actually a form of speech. Once you understand that Right wing speech is violence and Left wing violence is speech, it then becomes clear that the Left supports free speech as long as it’s violence and opposes violence as long as it’s speech just as they wish to suppress misinformation whenever it’s information and oppose book banning only so long as it doesn’t involve banning books, which they support, because if you don’t ban books, it leads to the spread of misinformation who, let’s face it, looks absolutely ridiculous in that bikini.

Andrew Klavan is the host of The Andrew Klavan Show at The Daily Wire. A popular political satirist and Hollywood screenwriter, Klavan is also an award-winning novelist. His newest novel is A Strange Habit of Mind, book two in the Cameron Winter Mystery series.

The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.