Tax Dodgers at Baseball Hall of Fame (7/23/12)

Todays' New York Times has an article on Tax Dodgers at the National Baseball Hall of fame.  Colin Moynihan, Protest Gets a Pedestal Among Baseball’s Greats (NYT 7/22/12), here.  The name Tax Dodgers may conjure up for some readers memories of prominent baseball players who have run afoul of the criminal tax law -- like Duke Snider, Pete Rose and Darryl Strawberry.  But this take is a different one.

The team name on the jersey displayed is the "Tax Dodgers" (the uniform is reminiscent of the Brooklyn Dodgers famed uniform), but the hat displays a 1% logo.  (There is a picture of the jersey and the hat with the article.)

Thus, the Tax Dodger concept is a political statement connected with the Occupy Wall Street movement:

The items, which were donated by a satirical street theater group tied to Occupy Wall Street, have been included in the Hall of Fame Museum not because of their political content but because they reflect baseball’s prominent place in the national landscape, said Tom Shieber, senior curator at the museum. 

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The idea to form the Tax Dodgers came early in 2012. A group of Occupy Wall Street activists formed a street theater group to satirize people and companies that use lobbying or loopholes to lower the amount of taxes they pay or to eliminate payments altogether. 

The group roamed through Midtown Manhattan on tax day, April 17, swinging baseball bats and singing about economic deception to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” They visited the Eighth Avenue post office where last-minute filers were standing in line, said Gan Golan, a member of the group, and brought a giant cardboard baseball mitt, emblazoned with the word “Mitt,” to a Romney fund-raiser at the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

For my prior blog on Duke Snider's death, see Duke Snider Dies: A Great Baseball Player Who Made a Wrong Choice (2/27/11), here.