After reliever Liam Hendriks allowed three runs in a Red Sox loss on Wednesday, he encountered an unsettling but familiar deluge of hateful messages on social media.
“This is almost a daily occurrence for almost everyone in this clubhouse,” Hendriks said on Friday morning, prior to the doubleheader against the Orioles. “That’s the upsetting part, and it’s not being controlled in the right way.”
Hendriks said he likes to be active on social media to promote charitable enterprises, to stay in touch with friends and family in his native Australia, and for “mind-numbing” end-of-day decompression. But in doing so, he often encounters messages that range from hostile to threatening.
“With the rise of sports gambling, it’s gotten a lot worse,” said Hendriks. “Unfortunately, that tends to be what it ends up being — whether it be Venmo requests, whether it be people telling you in their comments that I was like, ‘Hey, you blew my parlay. Go [expletive] yourself.’ … And then it’s, ‘Go hang yourself. You should kill yourself. I wish you died from cancer.’ That one kind of hit a little too close to home for me with everything I’ve gone through.”
Hendriks, who was treated for Stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2022-23, said he’s encountered worse — specific, threatening details that involved his residence when he pitched for the Athletics. In that instance, he said he sought the assistance of the Oakland Police Department to ensure his and his wife’s safety. And the 36-year-old said he has turned over a number of messages to MLB security.
But after the array of messages that Hendriks said he received during and after Wednesday’s game, he decided to flag the issue in a post on Instagram. In publicizing the problem, Hendriks hoped to stimulate dialogue that may ultimately contribute to action by sports leagues or social media platforms.
“This is something that is deplorable. There needs to be some sort of punishment so that people can think twice before they start doing this stuff,” said Hendriks. “At some point, everyone just sucking it up and dealing with it isn’t accomplishing anything. We pass it along to MLB security. We pass it along to whoever we need to. But nothing ends up happening and it happens again the next night … The more eyes we get on it, the more voices we get talking about it, hopefully it can push it in the right direction.”
Red Sox manager Alex Cora said he experienced threats to his family after news of his role in the 2017 Astros’ sign-stealing scandal broke in early 2020, and that MLB security had to intervene.
“It was dangerous and we were afraid, to be honest with you,” said Cora.
But as scary as that incident was, Cora said the threats directed at members of the sports industry have proliferated in recent years in conjunction with the increasing number of gambling platforms. He’s learned to put filters on the messages he receives, and said the Red Sox educate players and their families about how to navigate the social media landscape.
Still, he sees a need for broader efforts to address the matter.
“This is a group thing and whether it’s [Major League Baseball or the MLB Players Association], we have to protect our players, and we have to voice what we think,” said Cora. “I think [Hendriks doing so] was good.”
Hendriks said that in many instances, players have become “numb” and “a little immune” to the prevalence of hateful messages on social media, comparing the majority of it to in-stadium heckling. However, he also said that the messages he encountered on Wednesday prompted him to speak out.
Hendriks expressed gratitude for positive responses he’d received to his Instagram post on Thursday, but suggested a need for stronger efforts to punish those who threaten players and their families.
“When [social media posters] say, ‘I hope you kill yourself. Go jump off a bridge. I hope you die in traffic. I wish cancer had killed you,’ things like that, those are the things that you kind of have to take a little more [stock] of, just because, they could be idle threats and they could be nothing. But the alternative is pretty dire,” said Hendriks. “At the end of the day, there has been no repercussions, either from any of these social media apps where, blocking accounts, it takes a long time to get that stuff done, or whether it be from MLB security about trying to figure out any sort of repercussion or any sort of way to get this done … There needs to be repercussions for something like this.”
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him @alexspeier.
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