“Somebody yelled something from the stands, so what? You’re making millions of dollars to play baseball. You can yell anything you want to me if you pay me enough money.”
In a post-Malice at the Palace era of player and fan affiliation, where most communication comes in the form of social media trolling and hot take blogs, it’s no surprise that some live confrontations can turn awry.
Clay Travis, however, believes that with the popularity of sports at an all-time high, and with player contracts teetering on absurd levels, the relationship between players and fans should literally be one of zero substance; i.e. why should Adam Jones, a guy who’s making over $16 million this season, care in the slightest about what some drunk loser in Fenway Park has to say about him?
As LeBron James once infamously put it to his harshest critics, ‘You have to go back to your Unhappy Lives.'
The incident even led Charlie Baker, the governor of the state of Massachusetts, to offer up Jones his own condolences. Travis wonders why Baker apologizes for mean words from fans, but not for murders.
Travis says athletes have become way too thin-skinned in this current era, as their pampered and glamorous lives don’t exactly coincide with some delicate wallflower who can't possibly face real world themes of disdain like the rest of us.
“In this country, we have so-overvalued ‘mean words’. ‘Oh, somebody called me a mean thing’, f-ing deal with it,” Travis said. “I get called meaner things than Adam Jones did every single day on Twitter and I get threatened with death every single day on Twitter. You know what I do? I re-tweet it, I play around with it, I read those insults to you. Do you know why? People may say mean things to you. If you allow those mean things to impact you, you are giving their words power. Words only have power to the extent you let them have power.”
Travis says that for the right price, he’ll stand on some manicured grass in Boston and let an entire stadium yell crude insults at him.
“I’m a capitalist. I’ll roll into a stadium with 37,000 people and you can call me anything you want,” he said. “I’ll stand there and I’ll take it, I'll welcome it, and you know what I’ll hear? ‘Cha-ching, Cha-ching, ching.'”