New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez was hit by a pitch during a loss to the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday night, and the fans in attendance seized the moment. As expected, White Sox fans booed A-Rod mercilessly when he appeared in his first MLB game this season on Monday night. However, Joe Girardi thought they took it too far by cheering when Rodriguez was hit by a pitch.
“There’s something wrong with that,” Girardi said after the game, via CBS New York. “I often think that it starts from the adults. And if it was their child, would they want them to be hit? Because the kids will only repeat what the adults do.”
Girardi has a point. You never want to see fans cheering for injuries under any circumstances, but this seemed pretty harmless. If you watch the video, the fans started cheering once it was obvious A-Rod was fine and he started trotting down the line. The ball barely grazed him. Had he been hit in the head and fallen to the ground, I’d like to think the fans wouldn’t have cheered.
Rodriguez himself didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he found it funny that he happened to get hit after he forgot to wear his elbow pad for the first time in years.
“I didn’t hear that,” A-Rod said. “It was the weirdest thing. I forgot to put my elbow pad on — probably the first time in 2,000 at-bats. Walking up to the plate, I said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get hit in the elbow.’ On the second pitch, I got hit on the elbow. I couldn’t believe it. I love the fans in Chicago.”
We have seen NBA fans cheer when opposing superstars get hurt and NFL fans do the same when their own quarterback gets injured. Both of those situations were far more classless than what Chicago fans did on Tuesday night.
