He might’ve played in the minor leagues, but he brought some major bigotry.
The Boston Red Sox released minor leaguer Brett Netzer on Saturday, shortly after Netzer went on a racist and homophobic Twitter rant that also targeted Jews and Christians.
“I am a racist,” Netzer tweeted Saturday. “I do sometimes make assumptions based on a person’s race/ethnicity/culture. Glad that is out of the way.”
Multiple other Twitter users assumed that Netzer was hacked, but the 25-year-old responded with photos and video of himself.
He began his rant with homophobic criticism of Red Sox personnel chief Chaim Bloom.
“Chaim Bloom is a bad actor,” Netzer wrote. “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 asked for his own release from the Boston organization, and it was promptly granted. He then replied to a report that mentioned his tweets.
“I’ll go along with racist and homophobic, but anti-Semitic? That’s too far,” he said. “Bloom is a hypocrite and an embarrassment to any Torah-following Jew.”
He then threw in an anti-Christian rant for good measure, saying he was “a million times more anti-Christian than anti-anything else” and that “the only bigger fraud than Chaim Bloom is Jesus himself.”
Netzer was not going to be an important player for the Red Sox. He last played a minor league game in 2019 and was a career .263 hitter who never got above Double-A. After the pandemic canceled the 2020 minor league season, Netzer spent 2021 on Boston’s restricted list for undisclosed reasons, according to the Boston Globe.
In his Twitter rant, Netzer openly accepted his fate when another user pointed out that his baseball career had ended.
“I’m a career .680 OPS hitter in the minors,” he said. “That s--- has been ended.”
