Wednesday night after Puerto Rico’s thrilling 5-2 win over the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rican relief pitcher and New York Mets star Edwin Díaz injured his knee during the postgame field celebration. What should have been a joyous occasion for Puerto Rico, whose win advanced it to a quarterfinal Friday against Mexico, turned into sadness and shock for everyone who, like me, proudly supports the team. Not long before the freakish injury, Diaz had signed a $102 million deal to stay with the Mets, the largest ever for a closer; the team announced Thursday that he had torn his right patellar tendon and will miss the entire season.
Because Diaz wasn’t playing for the Mets or another professional American baseball team, arrogant American fans have decided he hurt himself in a “meaningless” game.
Because Diaz wasn’t playing for the Mets or another professional American baseball team when he hurt himself but instead was playing for the place where he was born, arrogant American baseball fans have decided he hurt himself in a “meaningless” game being played in an equally meaningless tournament.
How colonial of them.
There may have been no uglier response to Diaz’s injury than the one from Keith Olbermann, a longtime former MSNBC host, who tweeted: “The WBC is a meaningless exhibition series designed to: get YOU to buy another uniform, to hell with the real season, and split up teammates based on where their grandmothers got laid.”
He pretended to apologize. “Ok, it reads sexist and for that I apologize,” he tweeted Thursday afternoon. “Make it ‘where their ancestors got laid.’ That blunt description of the artificiality of the team assignments is also trivial and for that I apologize.”
There’s no need to explain why those remarks are awful, but some may believe Olbermann’s tweet was offensive only because of the vulgarity and agree with him that the World Baseball Championship is meaningless. Such a view betrays no understanding of what…
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