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The Boston Red Sox are in Washington, D.C., for a three-game holiday weekend series against the Nationals, and they opted to be VIP tourists during their off day.
The Sox didn’t have a game on Thursday, so several players took a trip to the White House to visit President Donald Trump.
Trevor Story, Justin Wilson, Abraham Toro, Romy Gonzalez, Connor Wong, Greg Weissert, Wilyer Abreu, Garrett Whitlock, Brennan Bernardino and Rob Refsnyder all shook hands with Trump in the Oval Office.
“The team toured the White House today as part of their family road trip to D.C.,” a team spokesperson said, via MassLive.
Normally, a team visiting the White House to visit the president is saved for celebrating a championship, but apparently, an exception was made.
Red Sox manager Alex Cora has been critical of Trump in the past – so much so, to the point that he opted out of visiting the White House in 2019 to commemorate the team’s World Series title from the year prior.
During an interview on “The Mayor’s Office” podcast back in January, Cora admitted that he skipped out on meeting Trump because he wanted to prioritize his home country of Puerto Rico. When the Red Sox visited the White House in May 2019, Puerto Rico was still recovering from the destruction of Hurricane Maria in 2017, and Cora wasn’t satisfied with the federal government’s response.
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“One of the things that — it’s not that I regret, but I think I should’ve been more clear — it was a visit to the White House,” Cora said. “I have nothing against the President at that moment. It was Donald Trump at that moment, President Trump, but I felt me celebrating something at that stage, while [Puerto Ricans] were still suffering, it was bad. I didn’t feel comfortable doing it.”
Cora says he would have felt “awkward” celebrating at the White House, given the state of his country at the time.
“We are part of the United States,” he continued. “What they do for us is amazing — the funding, all of that — but there was still work to do. And I felt very awkward, like, ‘let’s celebrate this at the White House’ right while a lot of people suffered here. People took it like politics. No. My thing is sports and my family, right?”
Mookie Betts also opted to skip that year’s visit, but he did attend the celebration earlier this year for the reigning champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Sox-Nats series begins at 11:05 a.m. on Friday.
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