Because Diaz wasn’t playing for the Mets or another professional American baseball team, arrogant American fans have decided he hurt himself in a “meaningless” game.

Because Diaz wasn’t playing for the Mets or another professional American baseball team when he hurt himself but instead was playing for the place where he was born, arrogant American baseball fans have decided he hurt himself in a “meaningless” game being played in an equally meaningless tournament.

How colonial of them.

There may have been no uglier response to Diaz’s injury than the one from Keith Olbermann, a longtime former MSNBC host, who tweeted: “The WBC is a meaningless exhibition series designed to: get YOU to buy another uniform, to hell with the real season, and split up teammates based on where their grandmothers got laid.”

He pretended to apologize. “Ok, it reads sexist and for that I apologize,” he tweeted Thursday afternoon. “Make it ‘where their ancestors got laid.’ That blunt description of the artificiality of the team assignments is also trivial and for that I apologize.”

There’s no need to explain why those remarks are awful, but some may believe Olbermann’s tweet was offensive only because of the vulgarity and agree with him that the World Baseball Classic is meaningless. Such a view betrays no understanding of what baseball and the WBC mean to Puerto Ricans. And not just to Puerto Ricans, but also to Dominicans, Cubans, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans.