I was gonna ignore this topic, but it keeps coming up on seemingly a daily basis, so I guess it's now time to address it. There were a lot of things about Sonny Gray's start against the star-studded Baltimore Orioles on Wednesday that was regrettable. His laughing as he was booed off the mound was bad enough. Then his tweets from a few years ago came to light.
Gray isn't the first baseball player to be haunted by old Twitter comments in the last few days. The Braves' Sean Newcomb was one strike away from a no-hitter on Sunday, but found himself apologizing for racially-insensitive tweets from a few years ago. Also on Sunday, Nationals shortstop Trea Turner found himself apologizing for old tweets.
This all started with Josh Hader at the All*Star Game. Hader had a tremendous first half and was rightfully selected to the NL All*Star Team. He got rocked in the All*Star Game, but no one wanted to talk about that. Instead, it was tweets that Hader sent as a 17-year-old in 2011-12 that made headlines. Hader apologized and called them a "youthful mistake," but MLB still ordered him to undergo sensitivity training.
It's a difficult situation that these guys are putting themselves in. Do I think any of them are racist? Of course not! Do I believe Hader's explanation of a "youthful mistake?" To an extent. We all said or did stupid things that we regret at that age. Especially if these were isolated tweets, you can point more to youthful stupidity as the reason than anything else. It still doesn't make them right. But it doesn't mean the person who did the tweeting is racist either.
That defense isn't going to fly with everyone, of course, which is their prerogative. But, unfortunately, that's the culture we live in now. Regardless of when it happened or how or why, it's one strike and you're out. And you get zero opportunity to explain yourself. Because once it's out there, somebody's going to find it.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not condoning what Hader or Newcomb or Turner or Gray said. Gray defended his as a back-and-forth joke with a teammate, which may very well be true. People aren't going to know that context, though. They're just going to see the offensive remarks and take them at face value. That's just the way it is. Which is why these guys find themselves apologizing years later for comments they might not even remember making.
The easiest way for this stuff never to get brought up, of course, is to never say it in the first place. Because someone will find it. That's the first thing I would always tell student-athletes in preseason meetings. Once it's on social media, it lives forever (much like this blog post). Which means a potential employer, your grandma, etc., might see it. And if you don't want your grandma to see it, you might want to think twice about posting it to social media. Sure, it can be deleted. But by then the damage most likely has already been done.
On Sunday night, I was either watching MLB Tonight or Baseball Tonight and they were discussing Newcomb and Turner. One of the hosts made a really good suggestion. He said that if a player has any doubt about something they might've tweeted at some point ever, they should just delete their account and start a new one. Again, not saying it at all is the best solution. But that's a pretty good alternative. Because if you delete the account, everything on it is gone.
Sure, somebody can still take a screenshot. But I'd rather take that chance than leave myself open to the alternative. Making their account private is another option, but fans wouldn't like that, either. It doesn't make you look very accessible if you set up a Twitter account, only for it to be private.
In their defense, the people who find these tweets and report them probably aren't setting out to ruin these guys' careers. I'm sure they have better things to do than scroll through seven-year-old tweets from Brewers relief pitchers. But once they see them, it's hard to stay quiet. (I give the New York Post a lot of credit for doing an interview with the guy who posted Hader's tweets and providing that perspective.)
Besides, how many athletes use their social media accounts for good? J.J. Watt raised how much money for hurricane relief in Houston after reaching out to his followers? Would the emoji-filled Didi Gregorius postgame recaps have taken on a life of their own if they weren't retweeted by the Yankees?
Teams and players use social media to interact with their fans every day. Which is why it's important for athletes to maintain a presence on these platforms. They can choose to be as active as they want. But the most important thing to remember is that they need to be careful. Because even though they might think nothing of it at the time, things can come back to haunt you. Even years later.
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