Atlanta Braves starting pitcher Spencer Strider made his first spring training start this week, fanning six Boston Red Sox hitters over two innings of work. Strider had been recovering from Tommy John surgery, but is on schedule to return early in the regular season. The plan is for Strider to slowly build back his elbow this spring and via several minor-league rehab starts.
As many positive as Braves fans should take from Strider's debut, there is one negative, and it has nothing to do with his performance. Strider discussed the state of sports gambling with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Justin Toscano following his first game. Evidently, Strider and some Braves players are tired of hearing about your parlays, and it's tough to blame them.
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Spencer Strider doesn't want to hear about your parlays at Braves spring training
Strider threw multiple scoreless innings and is well on his way to debuting sometime in early May, but sadly the focus wasn't entirely on the Braves pitcher's progress postgame.
“They’re violent in nature, mostly. Degrading,” Strider told The AJC. “You can’t help but see these things, so it’s not like anybody’s going out and looking for it. It’s just odd that even when you do well and the outcome that most people are interested in is achieved, there are still people that are frustrated with your performance. I’m always frustrated with my performance and myself, so I can appreciate that in a person. Yeah, it’s a weird dynamic. The messages are always — sometimes people say, ‘You owe me money. You didn’t do this.’ Stuff like that, so it’s odd.”
Strider is right, stuff like that is odd, and frankly uncalled for during an MLB game. Baseball is in bed with sports gambling companies, whether we like it or not. That is uncontrollable given the money involved in that industry. What we can control is how we, the fans, react during MLB games.
Spencer Strider calls out negativity of sports gambling
If a player were concerned about his strikeouts over/under during a game, that would be a concern to us as supporters of that star. So why would any so-called 'fan' try to use sports gambling as a means to criticize?
Please stop it, whoever you are.
“One of the biggest problems in my mind with sports gambling and how that manifests itself in a number of ways is that it’s so popularized now that people are interacting with a team or with a player or with whole games that their first desire is not for the team to win the game, or not for the player to do well — it’s for a certain circumstantial or inconsequential thing to occur toward the outcome of the game,” Strider continued, again per the AJC. “So, before everybody was addicted to sports gambling, it was, ‘I want my team to win. I want my favorite player to do well’ — not, ‘I need them to catch four passes regardless of the outcome of the game.’ So, that’s a weird thing. So I get — and other guys obviously do, too — negativity from fans that are gambling regardless of how we perform, which is a weird thing.”
There were plenty of positives to take away from spring training for the Braves. One of them is Strider, who is apparently battling on-field demons he did not sign up for.