At some point or another in life, everyone’s felt like they’re being singled out unfairly. Maybe your brothers are grabbing some good attention while you’re stuck in a reverse, maybe you’re at a school that can’t catch anything but bad headlines, maybe you’ve had a bad run at work and you’re boss is singling you out. Everyone gets stuck in ruts; we all know when it happens that the bad skein can’t last forever, but it always seems like it will. So we go on with life, mope around with ear buds in listening to Blood on the Tracks or Bon Iver or Iron and Wine, maybe grow a beard; you do whatever it is that pulls you through. Then someone gives you a break and just like that, it’s over. Maybe the right person notices you, maybe an experiment goes right (or, you know, something slightly less nerdy at your less nerdy job), maybe a friend or family member pays you an unexpected compliment, etc.
Once that happens, things start looking up. You don’t take everything so personally. You notice the nicer things in life. You don’t take life’s curveballs so seriously. What you don’t realize is that nothing in your life has actually changed except for you. The context that you put everything in is different because of whatever it was that caused you to stop being so emo and context, as Chuck Klosterman once wrote, is everything.
No one ever views anything in a positive context when you’re a baseball team that hasn’t had a winning season in 18 years. This week, the Pirates had two incidents that probably would’ve been blips on the radar if they’d happened anywhere else (or happened here with the Penguins and Steelers), but that were blown up into big stories because people expect the Pirates to be idiots and whenever the Pirates do anything, people start with the assumption that the Pirates are morons and trying to screw people over and then work backwards.
Take this Stroll Inn thing, for example. A bar decides to make a promotion that mocks the Pirates a little bit and cash in on all the Yinzer Venom that surrounds the team by offering a special in which the price of a pitcher is discounted by a nickel every time the Pirates lose. It’s a little bit funny, but it’s certainly low-hanging fruit and it’s the sort of negative view of the team that drives me nuts, but whatever, it’s the Stroll Inn’s right to do whatever promotion they want. They shouldn’t be surprised, though, that when people from the Pirates’ organization found out about it that they were pissed. If a bar on Franklin Street offered discount pitchers for every time a UNC research group got scooped, I’d be pissed. If a bar in Sharon offered discount pitchers every time my dad’s law firm lost a case, he’d be pissed.
So this account executive who works for the Pirates got mad and sent out a chain e-mail calling for people to boycott this bar because they made fun of the Pirates. This is obviously out of line and something the Pirates have no right to do. When the bar owner called the Pirates and mentioned it, she almost immediately got a call from the account executive apologizing. When the Pirates were asked about it, the official team response was basically, “The people that organized this boycott did not speak for the team as a whole and beyond the people that did this, management didn’t know about or organize or necessarily condone this sort of thing, but we also kind of think the people at the Stroll Inn were being dicks.” Frank Coonelly also apparently called the bar owner to say more or less the same thing.
Do I wish Coonelly had stayed out of it? Sure. Do I think maybe they could’ve handled it a little differently once they found out what team employees were doing? Sure. But is it a big deal or proof that the Pirates are evil and clueless and hate their fans? They can certainly be a little aloof, but almost all of the interactions I’ve had and been told about with the club have been exceedingly fan friendly, so long as you show them a little respect. In the simplest terms, don’t be a jerk and they won’t be jerks either. t
Then, yesterday afternoon Tony Sanchez cut off his Twitter account. Sanchez’s final message was something along the lines of, “My only goal is to get to Pittsburgh and Twitter is one of the obstacles, so I’m signing off.” I was sad to see Sanchez sign off, because he’s generally a smart, funny, likable guy that seemed to truly enjoy taking time to interact with fans . But I also could understand it because he’s taken some heat for tweeting about bad calls by umpires and what appeared to be a generally negative view of POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Pennsylvania. He’s struggling a bit at the plate this year and it was clear from his own tweets that he felt like Twitter was becoming more of a burden than a fun way to stay in touch with Pirate fans and so he closed it off. Story over, right?
Wrong! Literally hours after it happened, Dejan Kovacevic wrote a blog post saying that Sanchez’s account was closed “under orders from baseball operations” and that it happened because of how “insecure and thin-skinned” the club’s management is. Kyle Stark denied telling Sanchez to close his account, both to Kovacevic and Cory Giger of The Altoona Mirror, though DK says that he had two other sources tell him differently.
Maybe the Pirates did tell Sanchez to shut things down. It’s possible; this front office is certainly secretive and they’ve documented that on many situations, both well-publicized and under the radar. They pretty clearly seem to want one constant, controlled message coming from the club and having a bunch of players tweeting their minds makes that tough. Or maybe they sat Sanchez down and went over how dangerous Twitter can be for a 23-year old that isn’t afraid to speak his mind and who’s already under a big enough microscope without making 140-character statements that are prone to be taken out of context. I mean, I get myself into plenty of trouble on Twitter from time to time and I’m a 26-year old grad student with a few hundred blog readers and 1,700 followers that I suspect are mostly spambots. I can’t even imagine what kind of trouble I’d be in if I had an audience like Sanchez does on Twitter.
So maybe, after being presented with the realities both by the team and the attention that he drew to himself, Sanchez decided that the constant vigilance required for someone in his position takes the fun out of Twitter and that it’s not really worth it. Jameson Taillon tweeted about his first start in West Virginia well before the team announced it; the Pirates probably weren’t happy about that and he’s still on Twitter, as are a bunch of other prospects. Joel Hanrahan tweets about everything and he’s still there. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that Sanchez’s decision had as much to do with his own experiences as it did with the team leaning on him. (UPDATE: Frank Coonelly spoke about both incidents with DK; he said Sanchez was “reminded of his obligation to be a professional” but not told to stop tweeting, which was something he decided to do on his own after the meeting.)
The Pirates haven’t done much to earn good will from the people of Pittsburgh. I understand that and I understand that nothing will change the context in which they’re viewed until they start winning baseball games more often than they lose them. But if Bob Nutting and Frank Coonelly spent a day driving around Pittsburgh in a fire truck labeled “Kitten Rescue Squad” and did nothing but pull impossibly cute kittens out of trees, there would be a story on a local newscast or in a local paper about how the money that the club was supposed to use to sign a free agent shortstop was spent on a fire truck to improve Bob Nutting’s image and oh my god the Pirates hate their fans so freaking much. Sometimes, it really wears me out.
