The suddenly notorious Josh Hader’s first six games following the All-Star break will be at home in Milwaukee, and for that, the Brewers reliever should be grateful.

After the discovery during Tuesday’s All-Star Game of the racist, homophobic and misogynistic things he tweeted as a teenager, Miller Park might be the only stadium in baseball where Hader can expect to get anything approaching a positive reception for quite a while. In the eyes of hometown fans, the right numbers — like his 1.50 ERA and 89 strikeouts in 48 innings — can almost always make up for the wrong words.

But eventually, Hader will have to go on the road to pitch in front of a public that won’t be as inclined to overlook the ugly attitudes he expressed in those tweets, which included multiple uses of the N-word and declarations like, “I hate gays.” The most fascinating part of his experience will be the way he is received by fans in rival cities. And where will he face the first such hostile fanbase? In San Francisco.

The Brewers come to AT&T Park next Thursday to begin a four-game series against the Giants, which means that Bay Area fans will be the ones to give Hader his first taste of the kind of reaction he’s likely to face around the league for the foreseeable future. Fans in this part of the country don’t have nearly as vitriolic a reputation as other cities like New York or Philadelphia, of course, but if and when he’s called out of the bullpen next week, Hader can expect to be treated like a villain.

Giants fans will also have a baseball-related motivation to make sure Hader gets as cold a reception as possible. He has been a dominant bullpen piece for the Brewers, who could very well be one of the Giants’ main competitors for a playoff spot down the stretch. If the backlash from his comments rattles him enough to diminish his effectiveness over the rest of the season, it can only help the Giants.

The intensity of the inevitable AT&T booing is hard to predict; much will depend on what more, if anything, Hader says and does about the subject in the next several days. So far, he has stuck to a solid crisis management script, accepting responsibility for the tweets (instead of pulling out some bogus “I was hacked” defense), as well as apologizing, saying he no longer had the same offensive beliefs and that he would accept any punishment handed down from the commissioner’s office.

Hader did lean heavily on the excuse that he was just a “young, immature and stupid” 17-year-old when he wrote the tweets. “When you’re a kid, you just tweet what’s on your mind at the time,” he said in a mea culpa session after the All-Star Game.

It seems to have worked. His youth at the time is undoubtedly part of why MLB was lenient in its punishment. He was given no suspension or fine, only a requirement that he complete sensitivity training.

It’s fair to go a bit easier on Hader due to his age when he tweeted those things seven years ago, and it’s clear by now that public shaming for Twitter misdeeds sometimes gets overheated. But this was more than a youthful indiscretion, like toilet-papering a neighbor’s yard. A 17-year-old’s slurs and hateful comments can sting as much as anyone else’s. Beyond that, if Hader, now 24, has changed as much as he says he has, if he would no longer tweet such distasteful things, it’s also fair to wonder why he never felt ashamed enough to delete them until they came to light this week. An older, wiser, more tolerant Hader, one would think, would have wanted to remove the stain of the offensive thoughts he had as a teenager.

So, the question remains, what are you to think about someone who has expressed such vile thoughts but claims to no longer have them? How do you treat such a person? Friends and fans will have to make that determination. Teammate Lorenzo Cain, who is African-American, indicated Hader will find forgiveness from his teammates.

“At the end of the day, you’ve got to give people a second chance,” Cain told reporters after the All-Star Game. “You’ve got to forgive people. Like I said, we’ll move on from it. For me, it’s over and done with. He said it. It got out there. I’m moving on from it.”

Fans will eventually move on, as well, but maybe not as quickly as in some other cases. Hader is far from the first athlete to suffer from a Twitter crisis of his own making. In just the last several months, racially insensitive tweets from former Wyoming quarterback Josh Allen came to light and a tweet containing the N-word by ex-Villanova guard Donte DiVincenzo became public, but both incidents seemed to blow over fairly quickly.

But one important difference in Hader’s case may be that both Allen and DiVincenzo’s mini-scandals came during their offseasons. They didn’t have to perform in front of thousands of fans while their negative stories were still fresh in the public’s mind. Hader will have to do exactly that.

Giants fans, then, will set the tone for how Hader will be treated on the road, at least in the near term.

Though there are other towns in which he would undoubtedly get much rougher treatment, by the time he leaves the Bay Area, Hader will likely understand that the backlash from those regrettable tweets won’t evaporate overnight. Nor should it.

(Top photo: Benny Sieu/USA TODAY Sports)

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Taylor: Josh Hader will face plenty of scrutiny on the road, beginning next week at AT&T Park