Why I Love: Twitter

By The Common Man

As Bill pointed out yesterday, we’re trying especially hard to be positive this week about the game we love and why we love it. The Common Man can’t promise to remain completely cynicism-free (after all, The Common Man essentially runs on cynicism), but he’s gonna try his level best.

All of us speak through a filter, based on how we want the world, or parts of it, to perceive us. Baseball players are exceptionally good at this, having learned at an early point to speak in platitudes and clichés as they give interviews with the media. After all, one misquote or misstatement could be hugely embarrassing to them and to their employers, like Luke Scott’s paranoid and racist interviews with Dave Brown and ESPN earlier this year.

There simply is no incentive for a ballplayer to be himself, which means we’re left to get to know them second hand (through the descriptions of sportswriters) or to simply admire them from afar. Sometimes, though, that’s not enough. Certainly, we’re all too mature to still idolize players like we did as kids, but isn’t it nice to be able to root for a person as much as you’re rooting for a player?