Maybe, just maybe, this kid has some mental health issues

When I saw that the Red Sox had let Brett Netzer - a prospect I'd never heard of -  go for "a series of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-Semitic tweets," I was all set to gear up for a post along the lines of wonder what his backup career plans are...

And then I looked through the tweets and came away with the impression that this young guy may well be all of the above bad things. But mostly what I came away thinking that this young guy may well have some serious mental health issues.

Netzer is a 25-year old from North Carolina who was drafted by the Red Sox a few years back, in the third round. So, pretty high up.

He spent the 2019 season with the Sox Double-A club, the Portland (Maine) Sea Dogs, where he played regularly if unspectacularly. He sat out 2020, as minor league baseball was a covid casualty. And "he spent all of the 2021 season the restricted list for undisclosed reasons."

Hmmmmm.

His tweets were definitely career suicide, especially given that they went after Chaim Bloom, the Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer. Never a wise career move to trash the boss.  

Here's him having at Bloom:

"chaim bloom is a bad actor. dude went to hebrew school and studied the torah growing up but sold his soul to the sodom and race groups. good thing he is good at whatever he does in baseball," Netzer wrote in one of many tweets attacking Bloom, who is Jewish. (Source: CBS News)

Here's another one:

and if i remember correctly

- chaim bloom supports black lives matter, the organization, and the group of sodomy, lgbt pride. maybe there should be a word for ironic in Hebrew. (Source: @BrettNetzer)

Maybe it's all in the eye and ear of the beholder, but I don't think these are necessarily anti-Semitic. Netzer seems, in fact, to be questioning Bloom's adherence to his faith. Which doesn't make for anti-Semitism. More meshugas than anything else.

The racism and homophobia, well, Netzer owns that. 

ill go along with racist and homophobic, but anti-semitic? thats too far. bloom is a hypocrite and an embarrassment to any torah-following jew.

Is it possible that Netzer is himself Jewish, and is attacking Bloom's bona fides as a Jew, in much the same way some Catholics question Joe Biden's Catholicism, since he supports a woman's right to choose? (Bloom is observant, and went to yeshiva. Joe, well, he's about as Catholic as they come.) 

Netzer also gave a yep, that's me response when someone on Twitter asked whether he'd been hacked. So, forget the anti-Semitism for a sec. There's no way someone who's out as a racist and homophobe/transphobe is going to keep his job for long, especially if it's a job in sports/entertainment. (I do wonder how Netzer would have been treated if he'd been a phenom, rather than a guy who tried but never showed enough promise to make it to The Show.)

What there is on Brett Netzer's twitter time line is plenty of tweets that are unhinged. And getting unhingier over time.

His earlier tweets were mostly sports, with an occasional bit of weirdism thrown in. 

But then he got anti-vaxy.  And there's this:

...i am a million times more anti-christian than anti-anything else. the only bigger fraud than chaim bloom is jesus himself.

Seriously, you can no more get away being overtly anti-Christian in American sports than you can being racist.

Not that being an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-LBGTQ racist (who advocates for bitcoin) makes you crazy. (Nor does thinking all politicians are "scumbags.") It's just that there's something disturbing about his thinking, which appears to be deteriorating.

Easy to imagine that someone who'd spent most of his life trying to make it as a professional baseball player, only to get as far as Double-A - and then spend a year "on the restricted list for undisclosed reasons" - might be going through some things.

Sure, it could well be that Brett Netzer is just a loudmouthed, garden variety homophobe racist moron. It happens.

Or it could be something else.

I'm no psychologist/psychiatrist. Even if I were, I wouldn't be allowed to diagnose someone sight unseen. But maybe, just maybe... Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed when someone's in their twenties. Not that this is necessarily schizophrenia. It's just that there may be something going on with this kid that we don't know about. An "undisclosed reason," perhaps.

In any event, his career in baseball has more than likely come to an end.

Sad...