Chicago Cubs pitcher Marcus Stroman is a brash individual in all aspects of his life. He struts off the mound after a strikeout with epic levels of swagger, consistently brags on his talent, and frequently uses his Twitter to voice his strong opinions of…pretty much everything.
Yesterday, Stroman tweeted out that his former team, the New York Mets, were an organization that consistently ignored black players when they were being treated poorly (where have we heard that before?). The man who is famous for causing trouble seems intent on causing more in the very near future:
Endless death threats, being called a nigger often, hearing black lives don’t matter, and playing for a front office who didn’t care about any of that. I will speak on this topic on my time and on my podcast at some point. Still dealt on the mound through all of that! 🗣🤷🏾♂️ https://t.co/TA4jr41dGB
— Marcus Stroman (@STR0) February 23, 2022
Now to be fair to Stroman, he may have been racially slandered by Mets fans, and maybe the Mets were not as sensitive to player’s thoughts on the BLM movement as he would have liked (which is a subjective measurement at best). But Stroman needs to understand that no matter where he goes, there will always be people that say racist things at black people. It’s not right and it should not happen, but for Stroman to be surprised about is a little immature.
Furthermore, why is he dragging the Mets down for not doing anything about it? There really is not anything the Mets - or anyone - can do to banish racism. The Mets job is to produce an entertainment product (baseball) at a reasonable price and allow anybody who wants to consume that product come and watch games. While they do have a code of conduct that fans are supposed to follow, it is laughable for anyone to think that just because you set a standard of behavior that everyone is going to perfectly follow it.
Outkick reporter Gary Sheffield, Jr. (son of the MLB legend) perhaps said it best in summarizing why Stroman’s assessment of the situation is somewhat ridiculous:
“His tweet makes it sound like random fans blurted out racist or condescending remarks regarding the movement and that Stroman was upset the team didn’t do more to protect those that thought the way he did. What did he expect here? For the organization to have security listen in on every word uttered in his direction? No offense to him, but the organization has other stuff going on.”
While it would be nice if all people would just stop blurting out racist comments, it also would be nice if people learned how to let things go, move on, and not draw attention to themselves because their feelings go hurt.
But maybe that’s too much to expect.