Stained

Milwaukee Brewers All-Star pitcher Josh Hader was roundly booed in San Francisco last night, but not because he silenced the Giants bats in an inning-and-a-third of peerless relief. He was booed because, almost a decade ago, he was a dumb high school kid.

No, really. That's why.

It seems that back in 2011, when Hader was 17 years old, he did what a lot of 17-year-olds do: He acted the fool on Twitter. Unfortunately, in this case acting the fool involved a lot of vile racist and homophobic tweets. Being 17, Hader didn't understand the eternal nature of Twitter. Once you put something out there, it's out there forever.

And so during the All-Star break, when he should have just been soaking up the kid-on-Christmas-morning ambience of the whole event, Hader found himself answering for things that happened almost literally in another lifetime. This being America in 2018 -- a time perspective forgot -- he's continuing to answer for it. And probably will for a good while.

He's accepted that, to his credit. The Brewers have, too.

“This is hanging over Josh. He feels this every day," Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell said last night. "So that’s not going to go away after today. We’re on the road, it’s something different. But he’s hurting. So I don’t think that’s going to go away today.”

In other words, he's going to continue to get what amounts to a life sentence of shaming. And that in itself deserves to be shamed.

Look. There are people in this country who deserve to get called out every day for being racist or homophobic or misogynist. One of them resides in the White House. Many more are the nitwits who keep calling the cops because people of color are doing something suspicious, like Walking While Black or Sitting In a Restaurant While Black or Doing Their Jobs While Black.

Those people are getting exactly the shaming on social media they deserve.  So are the men who insist on using their positions of power to sexually harass women, or worse. The backlash against this -- that it's all the fault of rampant "political correctness" -- is both laughable and disgusting, given that what the backlashers call "political correctness" is nothing more than expecting people to behave like civilized human beings. That a big chunk of society at last finds it unacceptable to behave otherwise is one bright spot in an age when America seems to be marching resolutely backward in all other areas.

That said ...

That said, the shaming of Josh Hader is a bridge too far.

First of all, all those offensive tweets happened years ago, and who knows of whom they were a product. I don't know what Josh Hader's home environment was like growing up. I do know that the sorts of things Hader was tweeting are not the product of nature, but nurture. They are learned behaviors.

Also, high school kids are frequently knuckleheads. So there's that, too.

In any event, there is overwhelming evidence that in these intervening seven years, Hader has successfully unlearned those learned behaviors. His teammates say so. Everyone around him says so. And Hader himself has bashed his teenage self to a fare-thee-well, and apologized for his actions. Unless some other evidence shows up to indicate he hasn't changed, that ought to be the end of it.

Of course, it's not. Of course, Hader still had to undergo sensitivity training mandated by Major League Baseball, a frankly absurd state of affairs. And of course, he'll still be the target of boobirds on the road -- unlike at home, where his first appearance after the All-Star break elicited a standing ovation.

That shouldn't have happened, either.

So what should happen?

Oh, I don't know. How about nothing?