Keep booing, fans. Sometimes it’s all you can do to support your team.
Yes, I said “support your team.’’ If your team isn’t playing well, if the players are making dumb mistakes and not getting the job done, if the front office is a mess, you have the right to boo. You have the right to voice your displeasure. At least you are in the ballpark spending money on your team.
You actually have an obligation to boo.
The ultimate sign of displeasure is to NOT show up at the yard. Not to spend money. And some teams’ fan bases are already doing that if you look at the slew of empty ballparks around Major League Baseball.
The Diamondbacks, Orioles, Pirates and Rangers are on pace to lose 100 games. Four teams that pitiful speaks volumes about the way the game is being run today. Those fans have the right to boo if they bother to show up at those ballparks.
Booing took center stage this week with the Mets’ thumbs down controversy. Three players in particular: Francisco Lindor, Javy Baez and Kevin Pillar gave the thumbs down sign when they got hits and as Baez said it was their way of telling the booing fans to stuff it.
The most amazing thing about the gesture is that the players spent the time to dream this up. They actually came up with a plan to stick it to the fans while each of those players were struggling mightily at the plate.
“ACTUALLY, FAN BASES SHOULD BE MUCH MORE OUTRAGED THAN THEY HAVE SHOWN. THE AMOUNT OF BAD BASEBALL, POOR COACHING OR NO COACHING, LACK OF TRUE LEADERSHIP IS PRETTY MUCH ACROSS THE BOARD IN MLB.”
Look in the mirror, fellas. Lindor is batting .221 in his first season as a Met with a .366 slugging percentage, in the first year of a $341 million deal. Baez is hitting .227 as a Met with a .455 slug and had just come off a game where he foolishly was doubled off second base on a line drive to center field; where he never checked the position of the outfielders in a six-pitch at-bat in a one-run loss. Pillar, a reserve outfielder is hitting .212 for the season with a .338 slugging percentage and was incredibly cheered in his return from injury by the fans after being hit in the face with a baseball.
The players offered up “if I offended anyone’’ apologies after Sandy Alderson scolded them and then got the thumbs turned up, scoring five runs in the ninth inning Tuesday to beat the lowly Marlins with Baez scoring the winning run and losing a diamond earring in the process.
That’s MLB 2021 for sure.
Many former MLB players weighed in and essentially said “booing is part of the game, if you want to change the boos to cheers, play better.’’ That is the bottom line and I particularly like what former Met pitcher and current Mets broadcaster Ron Darling said about the situation while doing the game.
“If you play at a professional level, if you don’t figure out how to use boos as a lightning rod or something to produce a chip on your shoulder, that you say, ‘That’s not going to happen again’ or ‘I’m going to show them’, then you are in for a long or maybe a very short career because those things are going to happen today,’’ Darling said. “They are going to happen 100 years from now. You end up with the thumbs down. That doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That’s a confluence of a lot of things that have happened to this team this year that have gotten them to this point.’’
At the time, Darling said that the Mets were four games under .500. The Mets swept the two games against the Marlins and are two games under .500 in third place, 5 1/2 games behind the NL East leading Braves with one month to go in the regular season. If the Mets don’t make the postseason, the boos will come and will be well deserved.
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