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Brewers' Hader to meet with MLB VP Billy Bean after offensive tweets

Stacy Revere / Getty Images Sport / Getty

Milwaukee Brewers reliever Josh Hader will meet with Major League Baseball vice president Billy Bean on Friday to discuss his offensive tweets that were unearthed during the All-Star Game, according to Bob Nightengale of USA Today.

The meeting will also include Brewers manager Craig Counsell and general manager David Stearns. After that, Hader will get the chance to talk to his teammates about the situation.

Bean, a former MLB player who came out as gay following his career and was previously the league's ambassador for inclusion, is hoping the meeting with Hader might bring some positives from the situation, including the potential to involve the 24-year-old in some of the league's other inclusion initiatives.

"We will be moving quickly," Bean told Nightengale. "We have to be 100 percent transparent. I'll learn a lot more about him when I speak to him. He will have every opportunity to do right by the league, and be a role model if he wants to. He could grasp this opportunity from a very unfortunate experience and be a role model. The choices are up to him."

Tweets containing racist and homophobic messages composed when Hader was 17 were discovered on his Twitter account while he was pitching in Tuesday's All-Star Game. Hader apologized following the game, saying that he was "young, immature, and stupid" at the time he posted them. He's since deleted his account.

MLB has already ordered Hader to undergo sensitivity training and enroll in diversity and inclusion initiatives. However, the league will not be imposing any further discipline, and Stearns told Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Thursday that the Brewers also won't be punishing him.

"I don't think they're representative of who he is," Stearns said of Hader's tweets. "I think they're offensive. I think they're ill-informed and ignorant but I don't think they represent who he is as a person right now."

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