Ryan Rolison will start his professional baseball career having learned a valuable lesson.
The Colorado Rockies draft pick expressed his regret Tuesday over a 2012 tweet in which he called for the assassination of then-president Barack Obama. Rolison’s tweet emerged shortly after the Rockies selected him with their first-round pick and spread around social media before he had a chance to delete it.
Here’s what a 15-year-old Rolison tweeted the night Obama was re-elected to the presidency, according to The Athletic’s Exavier Pope.
Rolison, now 20, addressed the tweet Tuesday during a conference call with reporters.
“It was in 2012, and it was a stupid tweet, and it was immature of me,” he said, per Yahoo! Sports’ Liz Roscher. “I had no idea what I was talking about. It was immature of me to post something like that. People know that’s not who I am, and the Colorado Rockies know that’s not who I am.”
Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich expanded on the lessons Roscher’s twitter mistake can teach the sports world.
“It was a long time ago, and he didn’t really know what he was talking about, it was regrettable,” Bridich said. “If there was some sort of pattern of behavior, then we’d be talking about a whole different sort of topic, but in this world we live in, in this Twitterverse and Twitter world, and all this social media, these sorts of things are going to happen. And especially when it’s fully available to individuals who are not yet adults or thinking like adults, I mean look, not even adults make good decisions on Twitter.
“We know Ryan’s a good person, and we’ve had many conversations. We’ve had our people get to know him. It’s an opportunity to learn a lesson and move on to baseball, and I appreciate Ryan being up front about it. We can just move on, and I look forward to him really being part of our organization.”
