Bad Bunny made headlines when he opted not to stand for “God Bless America” at Yankee Stadium.
While the “Dakiti” singer and 2026 Super Bowl halftime performer hasn’t spoken publicly about the news-making moment at Game 3 of the American League Division Series, he and his crew allegedly offered up an explanation to another somewhat famous fan.
“I noticed he is sitting down and I take my hat off, I have my hand on my chest,” Laurence Leavy, the orange-wearing baseball superfan known as “Marlins Man,” told the Daily Mail. “They’re sitting down and I said ‘Dude, you guys have got to get up. They’ll give you a lot of crap if you sit down.’”
“And not Bad Bunny, the handler, said, ‘He ain’t getting up because he is pissed off because Trump and him (Bunny), they are saying he shouldn’t do the Super Bowl halftime show and that he should get a country singer who is an American. And we don’t think that Trump realizes that Puerto Rico is the United States.’
“I just said, ‘OK.’ I heard someone say, ‘Didn’t Trump go down to Puerto Rico after the hurricane and you guys went crazy because he was throwing toilet paper or paper towels?’ They were like, ‘Whatever.’ They were definitely not Trump people.”
Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, has been a target of Trump, fellow politicians, fans and pundits who oppose his Super Bowl position due to his songs having mostly Spanish lyrics and have petitioned to replace him or are planning alternate programming.
Bad Bunny also opted not to have shows in the US mainland on his upcoming “Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour” due to concerns that ICE would target them.
He showed up late to the game according to Leavy, spent a lot of time on his phone, caught a foul ball and denied TV cameras the opportunity to film him up-close.
“When the camera left I said, ‘What was that about?’” Leavy said. “He goes ‘Yeah, you know, half the world hates me, half the world likes me.’”
Leavy was certainly left with an impression of the 31-year-old multi-Grammy winner, whom he called a “nice guy.”
“He wasn’t trying to be a jerk,” Leavy said. “He just felt he didn’t want to stand, which is his right. He doesn’t have to stand, there’s no law that says you have to.
“But it was brought to his attention, it wasn’t like he overlooked it. It was, ‘Sou need to stand up man, everybody is looking at you’ and he goes ‘I’m not doing it.’ So, that was not an accident.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
