People need to chill out on Twitter — Also the sky is Blue

It seems like theres a trend in baseball to put-down emotion. In a long season, players who have to grind it out. They can’t tie all their emotional energy to one at-bat. One bad inning. One bad game. Recently, the hip thing for fans to do is to try to match that level of coolness after each game. And it’s becoming a little too much for me.

On Tuesday evening, author Molly Knight, who has appeared on the Fansmanship Podcast, tweeted what she later said “was a poor attempt at an overreaction to one baseball game joke.”

And people lost their friggin minds. The Dodger twitterverse, which I usually really enjoy, was kind of set ablaze by the tweet. Everyone from Brett Anderson to random fans seemed like they had something to say for the author of The Best Team Money can Buy. 

Knight deleted the tweet and tweeted a response.

Good grief. A poor attempt at an overreaction to one baseball game joke has got people hoppin' mad. Never tweet.

— Molly Knight (@molly_knight) April 20, 2016

But for some people it was too late.

Also, if you tweet me to say you are blocking me, but I don't know who you are/have never followed you.. Uh. Godspeed.

— Molly Knight (@molly_knight) April 20, 2016

The theoretically funny thing Knight was joking about is that we are 14 games into a 162 game season.

.@BiblicalDaddy I made joke about tonight's Dodger game, in the middle of April, costing them the season. It could have been better executed

— Molly Knight (@molly_knight) April 20, 2016

Following her tweet, there was a lot of vitriol. The Dodgers did play a crap game on Tuesday night, as they will at least 70-80 more times this season. Joke or not, people needed to calm down here.

The angry character Knight was trying to portray in her poor attempt at humor wasn’t all wrong either. Divisions are won and lost by just a few games a lot of the time and every game that the Dodgers don’t give themselves a chance to really win contributes to that. The adage that every game matters isn’t technically wrong. But the sometimes-crazy reaction to Knight’s joke tweet shows us that we have to come back and find some middle ground here.

You won’t ever hear me chastise someone for their feelings of fansmanship though — even if they are irrational. Molly’s tweet about the team failing to show up may have been a little off the wall. I’m sure if you asked the players, they’d say that they were right in the game and just couldn’t come through with big hits (they left somwhere around 734 men on base against the Braves). That’s a rational thing to think. Sequencing usually comes back to the mean.

There are also plenty of Dodger fans who actually feel exactly the way Molly’s tweet came off. And, that is OK too.

I’m all for being reasonable, but part of what makes sports — baseball especially — amazing for me is trying to find that sweet spot between intellect and emotion, rational thought with irrational rooting interests. Being a Dodger fan or a baseball fan online means you are part of a pretty large community with a lot of people, and a lot of views. I’m all for dialogue about how we all feel, but let’s leave some room for the die-hards who live and die with each pitch, each inning, each game. When we put people down for every emotional or irrational tweet, the leaders of the Dodger twitterverse can also come off as aloof, uppity jerkfaces. I’m not excluding myself from that group.

Instead, let’s encourage people to be pumped about the games and revel in the inherent conflict between our emotional tie to a team or game and the main part of our intellect that tells us that this single game doesn’t really matter. Maybe we’ll find some sports truth somewhere in there.

As a fan, it’s OK to be mad about a single loss. I won’t judge you. It’s also OK to tweet that it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re rooting for the Dodgers or whatever, shouldn’t we all be OK with how the next person does it?