I know many of you are, to say the least, wary of Twitter. I don’t blame you at all. I avoided it for a long time, only signed up under pressure from my publisher to promote my book last year, and approached it with a lot of eye-rolling and sighing about how the 140-character limit would be an oppressive bind on my beautiful, beautiful words. I know Alex (or @AlexBelth, if you will) has some doubts about it. And it’s far from perfect – it can be silly, shallow, repetitive, a self-promoting extravaganza. But it can also be funny and useful and downright supportive. It did end up being useful for book promotion and networking and what have you, but I’ve also made actual, flesh-and-blood friends through Twitter; for me, anyway, it helped me connect with people I might not have otherwise. So I know it’s not for everyone and understand the reasons for avoidance, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Well, mostly.
Anyway, via Hardball Talk, here’s a list of more than 200 MLB players with verified Twitter accounts, from Bobby Abreu (mostly in Spanish) to Ben Zobrist (yawn). Most of these guys, in my experience, aren’t a fascinating read – most are too PR-savvy and/or not great with words. I still follow my guy Denard Span, but only because I’m still hoping to find out whether he has any short, poorly coordinated Jewish relatives. And sometimes players slip the PR leash, for better or worse: the Rays’ Logan Morrison is usuallyentertaining, as is Dirk Hayhurst, author of The Bullpen Gospels. Nick Swisher does a lot of charity work on there. So does Curtis Granderson, who has also been pondering his at-bat music for this season; Ozzie Guillen is just as hilariously semi-comprehensible as you might’ve hoped. And the other night the Orioles’ Adam Jones tweeted a photo of turtles having sex.
Have fun out there, kids.
I am about as anti-social media as you can get, but have taken a liking to Twitter (follow me @williamnyy23!!). Ok fine, so a lot of it is about self promotion, and had I not started a blog, I probably would have never joined, but since doing so, I’ve found it to be very useful, not only for making like-minded connections, but also getting desired information. If you can create a well-honed follow list (i.e., managed to avoid those who tweet off topic about countless subjects, including every little detail of their personal life), Twitter can be a “to the point” source that complements the breadth of information available on the interent.
I may be obliged to do the same. Trying to get people to look at our videos on Youtube is very trying; I'm not into it just to get a million hits on something that means nothing to me or nothing at all. Twitter can only help if, like William says, I keep it focused to like minds who keep it professional. We'll see...
[1][2] It's a very useful tool for communicating with like-minded folks. I've been able to find out about so many musical events and groups I would have never heard of, in addition to baseball and world news updates. The "List" function really is perfect for weeding out the nonsense.
Oh, and it's a million times better than Facebook.
I joined twitter in '09, but after a while, the novelty wore off. I didn't have the time to send hours on there, and I felt like that made it hard to follow conversations of interest. I didn't log in once in 2010. Now I only go on to follow "big news", usually baseball-related (like when Neyer announced he was leaving ESPN).
That said, if I had a blog, I'd probably be on there all the time. Twitter has its uses, just not many for me.
Any interest in Liriano?
Looks like the Twinkies want to move him. Dunno if they want to trade him to the team that knocked them out of the playoffs two years in a row, though.
I definitely have a love-hate relationship with twitter, but in the end, it opened up a lot of doors for me.