In my February blog post Maybe THIS Is Why Athletes Are Cynical About Fans I chastised the many sportswriters and fans who had been slamming New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez. I wrote:
“I’ve always been amazed at the way sports fans decide that a particular player is a bum, or lazy, or underachieving, or ‘gutless,’ or whatever, and, based on zero evidence, start booing and harassing him….Baseball’s current whipping boy is Alex Rodriguez…Rodriguez is labeled a ‘choker’ because his performance in the playoffs the past couple years has been poor–ignoring the fact that all players will sometimes have poor performances in a selected handful of games, particularly against top pitching…A-Rod gets dissed and harassed for no good reason, yet the first time he doesn’t feel like signing autographs or is cranky with reporters, all anybody will talk about is what an ungrateful jerk he turned out to be.”
Last week I commented on the blog that “now A-Rod’s getting his revenge–he’s blasted 12 homers in his first 62 at bats and has a good shot to break the all-time April homerun record. He is also a good candidate to break the all-time homerun record.”
One reader pointed out a similar, and actually far more egregious case of an athlete receiving this kind of mistreatment–the tragic story of Houston Astros pitcher JR Richard (pictured above), one of the best pitchers in baseball during the late 1970s. The reader wrote:
“The classic example of this occurred many years ago in Houston. J.R. Richard was a great pitcher for the Astros for many years. He was 6′8″ with long arms and legs, had a fastball in the high 90s and a devastating slider and curve. He routinely pitched over 200 innings a year and struck out over 200 batters. He was a workhorse for mostly bad teams.
“Finally, he was selected to the All-Star team and was chosen to be the starting pitcher for the National League that year. Strangely though, in his two starts prior to the All-Star game, J.R. left the game in the middle innings complaining of being tired. Fans and Houston sports writers piled on him claiming that he was dogging it because he had just signed a big contract the previous off-season.
“J.R. pitched the first three innings of the All-Star game giving up no runs and striking out 4. Within three days, he had collapsed on the practice field due to a series of strokes which his tiredness had foretold. He never pitched again and the Houston sports writers never apologized for questioning the commitment of the man who had done so much for the Astros.”
To learn more about what happened to Richard, see the Sporting News’ article The tragedy of J.R. Richard: A story seldom told.
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