Favorite Players Become Hated Traitors
Boston sports fans seem to know this story all too well. A fan favorite player on the Bruins, Red Sox, Celtics, or Patriots, leaves for a rival team. It happened in 2012 when Ray Allen of the Celtics left to play with the Miami Heat the year after they knocked the Celtics out of the playoffs. It happened when Wes Welker left to play for Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos, and in 2005 when Johnny Damon left to play for the New York Yankees after winning the World Series in 2004 with the Red Sox.
History is repeating itself again this year. On December 4th, Red Sox player Jacoby Ellsbury signed a seven year, $153M, deal with ultimate rivals the New York Yankees. Ellsbury won the World Series with the Red Sox earlier this year. For fans of the team the similarities to Johnny Damon’s famous exit are obvious. The Boston Globe tweeted “Jacoby Ellsbury is yet another #RedSox player who switched sides in baseball’s most heated rivalry.”
Fans are handling this situation in different ways, but a lot of them feel betrayed by Ellsbury. People have been tweeting pictures of their Ellsbury shirts thrown in the trash, and some are even lighting their Ellsbury jerseys on fire. This is almost turning into a strange tradition after Welker and Allen jerseys were burned when the players left their teams. Comedian and Massachusetts native Josh Wolf summarized how a lot of Boston fans are feeling when he tweeted, “Should Ellsbury get booed when he goes to Fenway? Yup. Doesn’t matter what he did in a Boston uniform. He’s a Yankee and Yankees get booed.”