“Darryl… Daaaarrrrryyyyyyllllll… DAAARRRRYYYYYLLLLLLL…”
They were chanting his name all game long. Every time the inning switched, Darryl would run out to right field and the heckling would start right away.
I was maybe seven years old and we were sitting in the bleachers at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The bleachers are the cheap seats. It’s where a lot of the die-hard Dodger fans sit… and it’s also where the peanut gallery resides.
I remember this so vividly… and I’m not sure why. There was a group of people sitting in the bleachers – maybe 20 to 30 people – who just chanted “Darryl” the entire game. They also screamed obscenities to him the entire time (Dodger Stadium was pretty rowdy then, and I guess it can still get that way now).
Darryl Strawberry just stood there in right field and let the heckling roll right off his back, as if he didn’t hear a word. But, I guarantee he heard it all.
If you’ve never heard of Darryl, he was a rookie of the year, 8 time All-Star, and 4 time World Series baseball player in the United States.
But, even though he was a major force on the baseball field, he had quite a wild personal life, which led to him being suspended three separate times by the MLB.
So, while Darryl was an incredible player, he was also an easy target for the peanut gallery who enjoyed to harass him all game long.
At the time, I had no idea why these people were giving Darryl a hard time. All I knew was that there was this six-foot-six professional athlete playing in a baseball game with thousands of fans watching… And some of those fans were being complete jerks to him.
Of course, the biggest jerks were overweight, drunk, and appeared to have zero athletic ability. Does that sounds surprising? Often, people who like to freely share their negative critiques are also the ones who are the least eligible to be sharing those opinions.
Empty vessels make the most noise.
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“You’re going to get robbed.”
“It will take at least a decade until tourists return.”
“The power will be out for the next several years.”
“Nobody wants to do business there.”
I receive emails with statements like that everyday about Puerto Rico. Everyone loves to dog pile on a crisis. Classic herd mentality.
The best part is that most of the people making those statements have never even traveled to Puerto Rico, or they once spent a spring break there in 1987.
But, is all of that true? Are you going to get robbed? Are the tourists gone? Is the power going to be out for years? Is it true that no one wants to do business there?
You can read articles in the newspaper or watch some clips of the news on TV, but we all know that it’s impossible to really get the full story unless you experience it for yourself.
And that’s exactly what we did last month. We checked out Puerto Rico for ourselves. Is it perfect? Definitely not.
But, we found some pretty interesting things going on there… especially their very attractive tax rates.
We just released a report on the trip, and you can view it right here for free.
