Trea Turner, the last player to discover his nasty tweets

First it was Josh Hader. Then it was Sean Newcomb. Trea Turner became the last major player to have discovered old and ugly tweets.

The tweets, which were revealed late at night, were sent in 2011 and 2012 while he was playing at North Carolina State University. They mainly involve homophobic insults, referring to friends or others in a derogatory manner such as "fa *** t" or "gay" and repeating a racist line of the movie "White Chicks". If you're interested, you can see them here. They have since been removed from Twitter, but nothing ever really disappears on the Internet.

Turner issued a statement through the Nationals apologizing for his tweets.

"There is no excuse for my insensitive and offensive language on Twitter.I am sincerely sorry for these tweets and apologize with all my heart," Turner said. "I believe that people who know me understand that these regrettable actions do not reflect my values ​​or who I am.But I understand the offensive nature of such language and am sorry to have brought some negative light to the national organization, to myself or the game that I love. "

Mike Rizzo, Nationals Managing Director" I spoke with Trea about the tweets that appeared earlier He understands that his comments – no matter when they were posted – are inexcusable and take full responsibility for his actions, "Rizzo said. "The national organization does not tolerate any form of discrimination, and its comments in no way reflect the values ​​of our club.Trea has been a good teammate and a good citizen in our club, and these comments are not indicative of the way he behaved on our team, he apologized to me and the organization for his comments. "

It's been less than two weeks since this activity old tweets have begun to resurface, but we have clearly already fallen into a predictable pattern to be repeated more or less the same when this happens:

1. Tweets discovered

2. The player offers an apology of moderate acceptability to the best, with a reference to who is not "who I am", without explaining who he was when he made the tweets, why he thought that he was not going to be the one to do it. they were acceptable then and what changed in his life to make him different now, apart from the fact that he was taken hostage six or seven years ago

3. MLB ordering sensitivity training or whatever.

Which, of course, I guess that's the only way this kind of thing is likely to go. What seems to be missing in all of this, is any discussion of why someone, in 2011 or 2012, thought it was perfectly acceptable to say things like that publicly. and why no one had seen it before, even though – as was the case Turner – he was a remarkable athlete with a very high profile even then.

The answer, I suspect, is that a lot of young athletes – like many young men – are basically idiots who lack empathy for marginalized people and therefore feel that it's cool. use links and things like that so flippant. Maybe we should ask why this is the case and what we can do about it.

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