In the dictionary, a ‘fan’ is an enthusiastic devotee or an ardent admirer.
In 2025, fans are screaming at, harassing, and sending death threats to athletes without compunction.
Last week, Arizona Diamondbacks infielder Ketel Marte went viral on social media when a so-called fan began cruelly taunting him about the death of his mother, who was killed in a car accident in 2017. Marte was in tears, his teammates comforting him. From the dugout, their manager, Torrey Lovullo, was incensed and shouting at the agitator, who has since been banned indefinately from all 30 Major League ballparks.
The incident prompted widespread commentary online and within Major League organizations about how athletes are viewed and treated. How they get harassed, both in-person and online. How so-called fans will seek out, not just the athlete, but their loved ones, on social media to voice their frustrations, or worse. How betting has changed the landscape of sports and opened a Pandora’s Box. What, if anything, are the league and teams doing to take care of their players? Can this situation get better? Will it get worse?
‘Every single day’
Beyond-the-pale verbal assaults are becoming a far too regular occurrence at sporting events. During an April series in Cleveland, someone in the stands shouted at Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran, who’s been open about his mental health struggles and a suicide attempt in 2022, that he should have killed himself when he had the chance.
The Marte incident struck a chord with Red Sox reliever Garrett Whitlock, who lost his brother, Gavrie, in a tragic drowning accident in Sept. 2023.
“If someone talked about my brother, I’d probably have a whole ‘nother word to say,” empathized Whitlock.
“I don’t know what was said to Dennis Santana, but I guarantee you it was something pretty bad for him to take a swing,” added Whitlock, referring to the usually even-keeled Pirates reliever currently serving a three-game suspension after a physical altercation with someone in the seats above the visitors bullpen in Detroit.
“The majority of the fan interactions I have away from the field are all positive, and I’m a pretty large guy and I’m well-versed in self-defense, so I don’t really see someone actually trying to threaten me in person, because that just would be a dumb mistake,” Whitlock said with a chuckle. “But I’ve been cussed out away from the park a couple of times. I’ve had beer thrown at me a couple of times. I was walking on Commonwealth Ave, after the playoff game in ‘21 against the Astros, a guy in a car threw a beer at me out of his window and then drove off.”
Say it to my face
There remains a sizable gap between online and face-to-face interactions. Trolls, unlikely to ever have the nerve to utter the words to their target’s face, are emboldened by the anonymity and lack of consequences afforded to them on social media platforms.
“I probably get 10 to 15 (hateful messages) a day, and I’m not even a big name guy. I bet you Bregman and Story probably get 30 to 50 a day, and then Duran probably gets 100-plus a day,” Whitlock said of his Red Sox teammates. “Every player gets these messages every single day. It’s not like a one-off thing, we get them every single day… I think the worst one I got personally was, I blew a save on Sept. 11 and someone messaged me saying that I should have been in the Twin Towers when they went down.”
In May, Liam Hendriks revealed that he and his wife received death threats.
“Threats against my life and my wife’s life are horrible and cruel,” the veteran Red Sox reliever wrote on Instagram. “You need help. Comments telling me to commit suicide and how you wish I died from cancer is disgusting and vile. Maybe you should take a step back and re-evaluate your life’s purpose before hiding behind a screen attacking players and their families.”
When Whitlock’s wife Jordan took to Instagram to voice her support for Marte, she shared several cruel and violent messages their family has received, to emphasize how commonplace cruelty toward athletes and their families has become. Among them were references to sports betting and threats against the Whitlocks’ infant son.
“But the big ones are when they message our family. When you’re messaging my wife, threatening to kill my kid, that’s–” he paused to select a safe descriptor, “an interesting one. The line that was really crossed for me, and I really got mad, was when someone sought to message my wife about killing my kid. I think MLB needs to actually start paying attention to that stuff.”
Eye-opening
Having pitched in the majors from 2005-17, including five seasons in Boston, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow can relate to many of his players’ experiences, but online harassment isn’t one of them.
“Horrific is the word that comes to mind,” he said of the messages the Whitlocks received.
“I played but I think– Twitter was just becoming mainstream, and I was probably unaware enough to not really be super active,” said Breslow. “But it’s scary, these platforms for people to anonymously say these just like, awful things. You feel for the human side of all of these players. It’s really easy, when they put on a uniform and they can do these things on a field that most people can’t, to lose sight of the fact that they’re still just fathers and husbands who are going home to families with kids. And they’re people, at the end of the day.”
In 2021, Pew reported that 14% of U.S. adults had received physical threats online, a 100% increase from 2014, and 11% had experienced sustained online harassment, up from 6%.
The Marte incident was eye-opening for Athlete Logos founder Dan Abrams in New York, too. He posted a new design to his sports apparel and art brand’s X account: a ballplayer superimposed on a green baseball diamond, the back of his uniform bearing the word ‘Human,’ in place of a surname. Surrounding the image, an important reminder: “Behind every jersey there is a human being.”
What happened next shocked him.
“I got thousands of responses, and I’d say at least 500 players’ wives reposted,” Abrams told the Herald. “It’s very interesting to see how many wives, girlfriends, mothers of athletes are saying ‘This is terrible, this is happening to our husbands, our families.’
“I thought after a team loses, a guy might get a couple of tweets, ‘You suck,’ or whatever… and I thought New York, Philly, Boston, we’re a little rougher than the rest of the country and that probably doesn’t happen everywhere. But what I learned is how, first of all how often this happens. I’ve had people (from) Savannah Bananas, Korean and Japanese (leagues), every minor leagues, every facet, everyone related to baseball. And I saw (NBA’s) Karl Anthony Towns put something out (for Marte). It’s widespread in every sport… They shouldn’t have to live like that.”
Abrams decided to turn the design into a t-shirt and sell it on the Athlete Logos website. All proceeds from the shirt will go to a “charity surrounding athletes’ mental health.” He’s also in talks to partner with the MLB Players Trust on the project.
Virtual becomes reality
Even before he became a father last year, Whitlock was concerned about the real-world implications of online vitriol. Especially at Fenway Park, which wasn’t constructed with parking lots in mind. In photos from the inaugural Opening Day in 1912, horses and automobiles idle together on an unpaved Jersey Street.
“I’ve been saying our parking is not safe for years now, and nothing’s happened,” Whitlock said. “We’re within arm’s distance of people out there, and all it takes is one bettor that feels like they’ve lost everything. There’s no metal detector. It takes one guy that’s pissed off, to bring a gun right there and shoot somebody.
That’s the bigger security thing to me, the in-person. We get spit at, yelled at, and until MLB actually decides to do something about the in-person things, I don’t think they’re even going to do anything about the online.”
Major League BetBall
As if the anonymity provided by social media wasn’t enough, it became one-half of a lethal pairing in May 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. Suddenly, the outcome of a game had real-life risk-and-reward consequences. And the overwhelming consensus is that it’s poisoning the well.
“It’s starting to become so bad that it has to be called out,” Abrams said. “And almost every one of (the players) has mentioned sports betting as a turning point when it got worse.”
“I didn’t know what kind of impact (legalized sports betting) would have, but obviously you see a lot of people getting hate,” said Alex Bregman. “I’ve gotten messages online, of course. I’ve gotten yelled at during baseball games a bunch. I try and not listen to it and just continue playing the game. Obviously it’s real, though. There’s a lot of hate on the internet nowadays that wasn’t there when I first got into the league.”
“Almost every incident has been gambling-related. I’ve gotten Venmo requests, people being like ‘You (expletive) up my parlay, you owe me money,’” Whitlock said. “I don’t even call them fans. I call those people degenerate gamblers.
“To me, betting has been the whole big thing about it. And MLB’s not going to do anything about it because they make so much money off the betting. There’s betting in parks! Teams are like, ‘Hey we’re making money off this so we’re not going to do anything about it.’ Until they actually take it seriously, nothing’s going to change… And they can say they care all they want, but they’re making money, and money’s the thing that speaks to them, so they’re not going to do anything about it.”
“It’s clear that what has changed is the stakes, and the boldness with which people are willing to behave, and social media gives them this anonymity,” said Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. “You put all of these things together, you have a situation that we need to figure out how to solve, because these games are hard enough on their own. Then when you couple that with feeling like, ‘I just feel awful, I gave up a game, and now I’m going to go home and I’m going to find out someone’s threatening my family.’”
Where do we go from here?
Whitlock is among the athletes who feel the situation is without remedy. He doesn’t think Major League Baseball wants to take the proper steps. Worse, he isn’t sure they even could.
“If we sent every single one, MLB would literally be swamped. I don’t even know if they have an inbox that can hold as many,” he said. “So I don’t think that they can really do anything about it, but the ones that need to be really taken seriously are the ones that are sent to family members, stuff like that. That’s the bigger security thing to me, the in-person. We get spit at, yelled at, and until MLB actually decides to do something about the in-person things, I don’t think they’re even going to do anything about the online.”
“No one cares about it right now because nothing’s happened, but it’s just going to take one incident.”
Whitlock has one idea for how to improve player safety. He brought it up to Red Sox leadership, including team president Sam Kennedy and principal owner John Henry, at a team meeting in 2022. (Breslow was hired in Nov. 2023.)
“They asked us, ‘Is there something that you guys think we should do around the park or anything like that?’ And I brought this up,” Whitlock said. “I’ve been saying our parking lot is not safe for years now, and nothing’s happened. We’re within arm’s distance of people out there, and all it takes is one bettor that feels like they’ve lost everything. There’s no metal detector. It takes one guy that’s pissed off, to bring a gun right there and shoot somebody.”
Asked about the meeting, Kennedy said, “We take security, in general, very seriously. We’ve got 24/7 coverage here at Fenway Park, but it’s something that you can never be too careful about.”
“It’s this spiral that we have to figure out how to stop. I don’t know what the answer is, but there’s absolutely more that we have to do.” Breslow said. “As an organization, I think we try to do everything we can to support these guys, but clearly we have not figured out how to do enough, because it’s still happening. And I know it’s affecting these guys. How could it not?”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
