Red Sox 'really regret' Matt Dermody call-up after tweet backlash
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The Red Sox are continuing their apology tour after the debacle surrounding pitcher Matt Dermody.
A week after Boston called up the pitcher from the minors for a spot start despite outrage over his past homophobic tweets, chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom expressed regret over how the team handled the situation.
“We didn’t have all the conversations we should have here,” Bloom said, according to the Boston Globe. “That’s something we can’t undo. It happened and we really regret it. I really regret it, because it caused pain.
“I do believe people can learn and grow and forgiveness should be possible. But that requires having the right conversations and in this particular case, we just didn’t put ourselves in a position to have them.”
The Red Sox signed Dermody, 32, to a minor league deal in the offseason after he spent much of his career bouncing between the majors, the KBO League in South Korea and Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan.
In June 2021, while he was playing in Japan, Dermody posted a tweet denouncing homosexuality as a sin in the name of his Christian faith, which he later deleted.
“#PrideMonth. Homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God. They will go to hell. That is not my opinion, but the #Truth. Read 1 Corinthians 6:9. May we all examine our hearts, ask Jesus to forgive us, and repent for our sins. I love you all in Christ Jesus!” the tweet read.
The Red Sox claim they didn’t see the tweet before signing him, but became aware of it as social media backlash grew.
Still, the team went ahead with calling Dermody up for a spot start against the Guardians, in which he pitched four innings and gave up two home runs to Jose Ramirez.
He was designated for assignment after the game and sent to Triple-A Worcester, where he is scheduled to pitch Wednesday night.
Since his start, Bloom said the team uncovered additional information, including other insensitive social media activity, that forced them to re-evaluate his standing with the team.
“We pride ourselves on doing the right due diligence so that we can have the right conversations around these things. We realized as this was unfolding [after the callup] that a process that is normally pretty robust missed some things,” Bloom said, per Boston Globe. “There were other concerning things on social media. We usually don’t miss these types of things. In this case we did.
“We’re getting our arms around what the right steps are with respect to the new info, or at least the info that’s new to us. That’s obviously a process that we’ll need to go through to figure out the best way to address it and take it into account. We certainly take it very seriously.”
It remains to be seen what Dermody’s future holds with the Red Sox, or if he will stick around in the majors at all.
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