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I Hate the MLB Twitter Account

By Liz Roscher
Man! Man man man man man! MAN man MAN MAN MAN! MAAAAN MAN MAN MAN MAN! Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-US PRESSWIRE
Man! Man man man man man! MAN man MAN MAN MAN! MAAAAN MAN MAN MAN MAN! Mandatory Credit: Charles LeClaire-US PRESSWIRE

If you have a Twitter account and you follow baseball, you've probably followed the MLB account at some point. Maybe you were smart and decided to unfollow them rather quickly. Or perhaps you continue to follow them like me, sustaining years of brain damage thanks to their inane tweets. The tweets from that account maintain a base level of suck, occasionally deviating from that norm by being irredeemably horrible.

Last night, Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina left the game after a home plate collision with Pirates second baseman Josh Harrison. Harrison was out at home because Molina held on to the ball. Home plate collisions are dramatic and scary and could inspire all nature of tweets. This, however, is how the MLB twitter account chose to describe the event.

What the fuck?

What do you think is wrong with that tweet? Is it:

A) Sexist

B) Hideously unfunny

C) Stupid and in poor taste

D) All of the above

The answer, of course, is D. Sexism isn't right anytime, anywhere (duh), and here it seems like whoever wrote that tweet was trying to make a joke. A bad, unfunny, unnecessary joke about a guy who had to leave a game after getting crashed into by another guy running at top speed. Isn't that totally hilarious?! Even funnier? He held onto the ball! BECAUSE HE'S A MAN. It's not because he's tough as nails or good at his job. It's because he doesn't have ovaries or a uterus, which automatically make you inferior.

The MLB twitter account is famous not for being useful or interesting, but for being unbelievably horrible. I looked back through six days of tweets -- just six days! -- and found a few more gems.

This might be the worst tweet of all time. In the history of creation. First off, way to get on the "Call Me Maybe" train two to three months late. Secondly, It doesn't even fit! Mayberry has too many syllables! And finally, thanks for getting "Call Me Maybe" stuck in my head, @MLB. It took me a long time to kill that earworm, and you've undone all that work. Everybody hates you.

Cray, cray? CRAY, CRAY?! That's all they could say about a game in which there were 38 hits and 27 runs between both teams? A game that the Red Sox lost by just one run? Because using an online thesaurus is apparently too complicated and/or time consuming, here are a few other words the @MLB tweet writer could have used that wouldn't sound like an overly trendy douche bag trying waaaay too hard: batty, insane, kooky, berserk, ridiculous, bizarre, nutty, outrageous, silly, or wacky. Also? There's no comma in cray-cray. They screwed up being douche baggy. They couldn't even get that right.

Yes, his first name is Adrian. And there aren't a lot of Adrians in pop culture (or otherwise) to reference. There's the costume designer, the only English pope, Google tells me there's also a city in Michigan called Adrian. So I can *sort of* understand what they were going for. But this is something the @MLB tweet writers do constantly that irks me to no end -- the best pop culture references work on more than one level. If Adrian Beltre was from Philadelphia or had played there at some point, this would make more sense. Or if his favorite movie was Rocky. Or if the pitcher he was facing was named Apollo. Or if the manager of the Rangers was Burgess Meredith. Or if Ron Washington constantly yelled from the dugout "You're gonna eat lightnin' and you're gonna crap thunder!"

I'm no grammar cop, but I think using the correct form of "to have" is kind of basic. I could understand missing a hyphen or a semicolon. But I know a five-year-old who would know better than that. And "our bad"? Really? You say "my bad" when you forget your Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper in your locker, which has your group presentation on the USSR in the front inside pocket. Or when you accidentally hit on your best friend's girlfriend outside Orange Julius while you wait for him to buy your tickets to Terminator 2. I'm not sure this is the spot to use that. Plus, it sounds like they're apologizing for calling Yadier Molina a wuss (or the opposite of tough, i.e. a vagina having WOMAN), which they didn't do. How does someone not know how to use "my bad"?

As long time readers might have picked up on, I tend to take issue with MLB's "marketing" "strategy". (I talk about a few of my issues here, here, here and here.) If you look at what they tweet and some of the merchandise they sell, it just screams UNCOOL and UNHIP in a loud, shrill voice. That's simply a result of trying too hard. You can't try to be cool or hip. It's a lesson that most kids learn in grade school or middle school (or at least I did). You see the cool kids, and they're cool because you think they are. You try to be like them, and you are automatically not cool because you're trying. MLB wants so desperately to live up to the image of "cool" or "awesome" or "totally rad, bro!" that they have in their collective heads that not only do they miss that entirely, but they go all the way around and look stupid to the point of ridicule.

It's baseball. There are fantastic and interesting things happening every day. They don't have to try hard to find material -- it's all right there in front of them. Maybe that's why they feel like they need to jazz everything up with an incredibly stupid comment. But they really don't. It cheapens everything. Baseball needs a lot of things. Like better blackout rules, for example. Or perhaps expanded replay. But you know what baseball doesn't need? Any more references to "Call Me Maybe".

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