Cleveland Guardians outfielder Myles Straw had the courage to stand up for the dozens of baseball players who are on the receiving end of verbal abuse during games.
It happened on Saturday, in the middle of a hotly contested game between the Guardians and the New York Yankees, in Yankee Stadium.
Fans of the home team are generally not too kind with visiting players (and even some home players, too, at times), and Straw had enough of it.
“Myles Straw gets up on the wall and gives Yankees fans a piece of his mind for how they treated Kwan after he banged into the wall,” MLB analyst Ben Verlander tweeted.
Myles Straw gets up on the wall and gives Yankees fans a piece of his mind for how they treated Kwan after he banged into the wall
— Ben Verlander (@BenVerlander) April 23, 2022
Steven Kwan had hurt himself against the left field wall trying to make a play.
As the MLB world saw, the scene got ugly as fans threw beer cans at the Guardians players.
A Tense Moment At Yankee Stadium
Straw went up the wall and had a face-to-face with the fan: it didn’t go beyond that, but it was a tense scene in New York.
While baseball players should not react to whatever they hear from the stands, the fans should be respectful, too.
Athletes have lives of their own: they are human beings, with feelings.
They are not made of rock.
Believe it or not, and no matter how much they make (that is irrelevant in this discussion, even if some fans insist on including that in the discussion), baseball players feel pressure and it can affect their lives.
Straw did what hundreds of professional athletes, not only baseball players, have wanted to do for years.
And all he did was talk.
However, he needed to be heard, and he made sure that happened.
There should be a line, one that players and fans are not allowed to cross, when it comes to verbal abuse.
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