Red Sox's Liam Hendriks Decries Sports Gambling After Recent Death Threats

Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Liam Hendriks came forward on Thursday to report that he and his wife faced death threats following his poor showing against the New York Mets earlier this week.

In a statement on his Instagram story, Hendriks told fans who had sent vile hate messages telling him, among other things, to take his own life to "take a step back and reevaluate your life's purpose."

"I think I speak for all players who have had to deal with this in their career when I say: Enough is enough," Hendriks said,

On Friday, Hendriks appeared on the "Baseball Isn't Boring" podcast to expand on the seriousness of the problem, which he said was "rampant" both across sports and in the Red Sox clubhouse specifically.

"Unfortunately, it's rampant within sports," Hendriks said. "I've had people from different organizations, I've had people in different sports, different codes, reach out about their own experiences with it. I've had people that have had their home addresses leaked... like, it's a lot more deplorable than what we've had.

"This is almost a daily occurrence for everyone in this clubhouse. That's the upsetting part, and it's not being controlled in the right way... At some point, something's got to break."

Hendriks also identified legalized sports gambling as one of the biggest problems enabling those who send threats, saying many of the comments he gets nowadays are from angry gamblers who lost money betting on him or his team.

"With the rise of sports gambling, it's gotten a lot worse," Hendriks said. "Unfortunately, that tends to be what it ends up being, whether it be Venmo requests, whether it be people telling you in their comments that it was like, 'Hey you blew my parlay, go f*** yourself,' that kind of s***.

"And then it's, 'Go hang yourself,' 'You should kill yourself,' 'I wish you died from cancer.' That one kind of hit a little too close to home for me with everything I've gone through... More people need to talk out about this so we can get some sort of action, some sort of response, some sort of repercussions for the people doing it."

Hendriks is commonly acknowledged as one of the nicest, most charitable people in baseball, and making light of his cancer treatment, which he underwent successfully in late 2022 and early 2023, is positively deplorable.

A larger conversation certainly needs to start happening in sports about the excesses of gambling and how to curb those who can't be trusted to do so responsibly without threatening the athletes they're betting on.