Flaws for concern in us all
Jocks deserve chance to prove new maturity
We have arrived in an era when young major league ballplayers are being haunted by old, high-school-level tweets. The ballplayers’ grimy, immature, teen-aged rants are being dug up, dusted off and placed on modernday display, and this has caused lots of hand-wringing, apologies and edicts to attend sensitivity training classes.
It happened a couple of weeks ago when 24-yearold Milwaukee Brewers left-hander Josh Hader was pitching in the All-Star Game at the same time old tweets from his high-school days were being unearthed. The tweets amounted to a Triple Crown of racism, homophobia and misogyny. Hader was 17 when he posted the tweets.
It happened again Sunday when Atlanta Braves lefty and Massachusetts-native Sean Newcomb was carrying a no-hitter into the ninth inning against the Los Angeles Dodgers, a collection of wrinkly tweets from his days at Middleboro High School were rejuvenated. Via a piece filed by Steve Gardner of USA Today, it has been discovered Newcomb once tweeted stuff that contained homophobic and racial slurs. Newcomb was 18 when he posted it.
Next up to bat: Washington Nationals shortstop Trea Turner has apologized for some homophobic and racially insensitive tweets he posted while in high school. He is 25 now, was 18 then.
Not counting the time several years ago when I met Newcomb’s father on Boylston Street — he gushed about his son’s mound prowess and rightly predicted the kid was going places — I know nothing about the backgrounds of Hader, Newcomb and Turner. What I do know is that the men have apologized profusely, offering variations of how the old tweets do not represent who they are today. Billy Bean, the openly gay former big league player who now works for Major League Baseball, has met with Hader and presumably will do likewise with Newcomb and Turner. They are about to become as familiar with sensitivity class as they are with the dugout.
Is that enough?
Let’s try to go point by point here.
In Steven Spielberg’s cinematic masterpiece “Lincoln,” a scene shows our 16th president deciding to grant a pardon to a 16-year-old Union soldier who is facing execution for laming a horse in order to avoid battle.
“He oughtn’t to have done that, crippled his horse, that was cruel,” Lincoln says to aide John Hay. “But you don’t just hang a 16-year-old boy for that, for cruelty. There’d be no 16-year-old boys left.”
To which Hay responds, “Ask the horse what he thinks.”
That scene resonated with me, partly because the history nerd/baseball fan in me knows that the real-life John Hay was the grandfather of Joan Whitney Payson, the original owner of the New York Mets. But, mainly, the scene resonates for its brilliance: 16-year-olds, and all teenagers for that matter, can do cruel things.
It’s called being immature. And we’ve all been members of this club, the only difference being that anyone whose teen-age years weren’t played out in the age of social media needn’t worry about an old tweet comin’ ’round the mountain to haunt them in their adult years.
Haden, Newcomb and Turner are the not-so-proud owners of old, inappropriate tweets. They were jerks when they wrote them. They say they aren’t jerks any more, that they’ve matured, grown up. We owe them the opportunity to prove it to us.
Point No.2: There was a time when professional athletes were routinely propped up as fake role models for kids and codgers alike, smiling at us from the back of magazines and the front of cereal boxes and trumpeting the importance of a balanced breakfast, studying hard and getting a good night’s sleep.
But life isn’t so simple any more, and we’re not so naive, kids especially. Yet now, more than ever, professional athletes have very real power in terms of providing a valuable life lesson for today’s amateur athletes. The betting here isn’t just that hundreds and thousands of teenagers are at this very moment scrubbing their social media accounts from postings that might get them into trouble later on, but that they’re awakening to the importance of not posting such trash in the first place.
Red Sox and Cubs World Series hero Jon Lester tweeted yesterday, “If you’re on Twitter, please spend the 5 minutes it takes to scrub your account of anything you wouldn’t want plastered next to your face on the front page of a newspaper. Better yet, don’t say stupid things in the first place. Too many young guys getting burned. #themoreyouknow”
Point No. 3: Do not make the mistake of dismissing these old tweets as “harmless,” or attaching a boys-will-be-boys mentality to what they did.
Several years ago, Cyd Zeigler of outsports.com wrote a stunningly revealing piece about a gay college baseball player, still closeted at the time, who was so unglued by the casual homophobia on his own team that he contemplated suicide. By extension, then, consider the possibility that Hader, Newcomb and Turner had a closeted gay teammate who saw their tweets.
We will likely see more of these cases, since Hader, Newcomb and Turner are not the only adults in their mid-20s who have left digital crumbs from their highschool days.
But the optimist in me believes we’ll see less of it in the years to come, because Hader, Newcomb and Turner are reminders to us of what’s acceptable on social media, and what is not.
They don’t deserve standing ovations for owning their mistakes. Nor should they be booed, which happened to Hader the other day in San Francisco.
Their very public apologies in no way make them heroes. It reveals them as flawed human beings, as we all are.