By now I’m sure most of you have heard or read about what David Price said on Twitter regarding the attendance at Tropicana Field last night for the Rays attempt to clinch the American League East. By now I’m sure you’ve talked about, or heard discussions about, how terrible it was for a professional athlete to come out and say anything that could be perceived as negative towards a fanbase. By now, I hope, you’ve realized there’s no real reason why you should care.

At roughly 11p.m. eastern Price decided that he’d take his opinions of the nightly crowd in Tampa/St. Petersburg, pretty well recognized as an area having one of the worst fan attendance-to-team-quality ratios in all the Major Leagues, and let go this nugget for all the world to see:

@DAVIDprice14 Had a chance to clinch a post season spot tonight with about 10,000 fans in the stands….embarrassing

Now at first glance it would seem to be a shot at the fans, I guess. On the one hand you have a team barreling towards yet another post-season berth, in baseball’s toughest division, with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, in one of the worst stadiums in baseball, which routinely draws sparse crowds. On the other a professional athlete, a (gasp!) highly-paid professional athlete, sharing an opinion on what he felt was lack of support from his team’s hometown fans. Clearly David Price should eat his words.

And eat them he did, sort of, when after what must have felt like the longest hour of his life went by:

@DAVIDprice14 If I offended anyone I apologize I did not think it was gonna turn into this…

Surely Price didn’t think his tweet would move a fanbase enough to comment considering they didn’t care enough to go see his team play. (See what I did there?) But after that hour in which he spent answering and reading tweets from fans and media types about how terrible of a person he was for saying such an awful thing, Price apologized. (Except, that wasn’t really an apology.)

A college professor once told me that, “being offended is a choice; you have to choose to be offended by something someone says.”

The best, or should I say most comical, rebuttals to Price took social and moralist stands that just do not apply to anything a professional athlete could ever say. The people making those rebuttals chose to be offended out of something they thought Price was saying instead of what he actually was saying.

To argue that a professional athlete should never tell us “normal people” what to do with our money in a down economy, is absurd. At no point did Price say anything about what a fan should, or should not, do with their money. He was merely making an observation. To take anything more out of his comments than that is reckless.

Too often people are quick to be offended by what someone says without actually taking a second to think about what was actually being said. The Royals went through this a month-or-so back with Zack Greinke when he commented that a youth movement didn’t mean much to him because his contract only ran through 2012, so why worry about what happens after? Of course the usual kicking and screaming ensued from oblivious-to-reality Royals fans that kept saying things like “well if Zack doesn’t want to be here he can leave” and “Greinke makes  a lot of money, he should shut-up and pitch.” Moving stuff.

All of this noise and offense was being taken towards a player who never actually said anything that wasn’t fact. And we all know that Americans don’t like to hear facts when they affect them negatively.

What’s worse are the people having the ignorance to be offended in the Price situation however, is more than one national baseball writer implied that it’s never a good idea for millionaires to tell non-millionaires what to do with their money.

Huh?

Clearly I’ve missed something in the translation of “only 10,000 fans…embarrassing” that really meant “you cheapskates, buy tickets to these games, losers.”

It’s laughable that every time an athlete says almost anything, immediately there’s the “you make lots of money, what do you have to complain about?” card being played. Well, it’s not laughable, it’s embarrassing.

It’s embarrassing that fans can’t separate their admiration and love of a sport with the athletes that perform for a job. That’s all it is. Professional athletes have a job and that job is paid very well because the market dictates it to be that way. Big deal. We should all stop romanticizing what these players do because we all at one point had the dream of doing it too.

Everyone should take a second, relax, and realize that what David Price thinks, what David Price says, has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else’s life. Stop being sensitive to what an athlete says because he’s “out of touch with society” or because a “millionaire shouldn’t tell a non-millionaire what to do with their money.” Stop, just stop, choosing to be offended by what some guy in Tampa, Florida, said on Twitter.