Cubs 2019 preview: Kris Bryant still hearing it after calling St. Louis ‘boring’

MESA, Ariz. — The Cubs shouldn’t have to worry about being bored when they get to St. Louis this year, not after the way Kris Bryant unwittingly stoked the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry with his “St.  Louis is boring” comment, which went viral as soon as he said it during the Cubs Convention in January.

Considering all the unsolicited advice Bryant got afterward, he won’t have to wait until he gets to the ballpark to find something interesting in the sleepy burg on the river.

“I might have to explore a little bit when I get there and find some more stuff to do,” he said. “I definitely heard some more things to do there, which I might actually get out and try to do.”

Bryant laughed about the swift and “surprising” backlash from Cardinals fans and players — including an angry Yadier Molina — after his St. Louis remarks during Ryan Dempster’s annual late-night “talk show” for fans at the convention.

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“It’s still going on,” Bryant said during spring training, a month after the event. “It’s like, ‘OK, I guess it’s good for the rivalry.’ They’ll be interesting games. But I think it was taken totally out of context. We all know that it was a comedy show . . . trying to get fans excited for the season. I think it certainly did do that.”

Bryant said he enjoyed Cardinals reliever John Brebbia’s reaction (“Cry me a river, loser”) during a radio interview the following morning, even if he doesn’t know Brebbia.

“It’s the perfect response to it. I kind of got a chuckle out of that,” Bryant said.

“It kind of just exploded. There wasn’t really anything going on. It was [the] Cubs Convention; [the Cardinals] had their fan fest, too, at the same time. So it was kind of a perfect storm for media attention and fan attention.”

Not everybody played it off like Bryant and Brebbia. Molina called Dempster and Bryant “losers” and “stupid” on social media.

And fans are still upset during spring training. A St. Louis columnist tweeted about one fan’s reaction upon spotting Molina heading to a practice field: “We hate Kris Bryant!”

“I wasn’t attacking anybody,” Bryant said. “I wasn’t attacking anybody’s family, the organization or the fans. It was totally taken out of context. You’d have to ask [Molina] what he thinks about it, if he has anything to say since then. But it did come off a little strong, kind of caught me off guard a little bit. But, hey, you never know how people will react to what you say. Everybody’s got a different mindset in how they approach things and what they look at. That’s how he looked at it.”

Bryant doesn’t plan to go out of his way to clear the air with Molina when the teams meet May 3-5 at Wrigley Field.

“I mean, if he’s willing to,” Bryant said. “I don’t think I said anything wrong. So you don’t take anything back.”