The Toronto Blue Jays designated reliever Anthony Bass for assignment on Friday in yet another instance of professional sports leagues having to reckon with the values of their players with the cultural image they’d like to maintain.

The roster move came after Bass defended his recent post calling for boycotts of companies like Target and Bud Light after their marketing decisions showing support for the LGBTQ+ community. While he said he was educating himself on the issue during a media appearance last Thursday, he also claimed to have been simply standing by his personal beliefs.

Now more than ever, professional sports leagues and teams are aware of the role they play in broader social justice conversations, whether they want to or not. Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins may have tempered his statement by using strictly relevant terms like “performance” and “baseball decision”, but moves like this are part of a growing corporate understanding that what they say and who they choose to platform matters.

However, these decisions are made a lot easier when the players in question are largely expendable. Boston Red Sox pitcher Matt Dermody was called out for tweeting that gay people “will go to hell” in 2021 before making his MLB debut last Thursday, and proceeded to give up three earned runs in four innings of work. 

He was cut after the game in a move that was most likely made to accommodate the return of outfielder Adam Duvall from the Injured List, but a statement from Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom that — to his credit — cited the impact of such hateful statements on fans, employees, and other “people we really care about” implied a little more awareness on the part of the front office.

The true barometer of how strong a stance professional sports teams are willing to take in supporting social issues will come when a non-expendable player gets caught up in a problematic situation like Bass’s or Demody’s. The NHL got a taste of this when multiple players across multiple teams refused to wear rainbow-themed warmup jerseys, including players who regularly saw time on the ice.

Damage control largely fell to individual players in that instance, but as time passes and progressive beliefs become more mainstream, organizations will have to show increasingly decisive action, even — and arguably, especially — if the problematic statements or actions in question are coming from their star players. It may be some time before the state of social justice discourse requires that level of accountability, but if the past is any indication, that day will come eventually.