Who amongst us hasn’t dreamed of a day in which their MLB.com day jobs would afford the likes of Barry M. Bloom and Marty Noble with an opportunity to wax poetic about their fave movies, BBQ sauce recipes or advice to the love-lorn? OK, maybe that’s a bit far-fetched. How about this MLB.com columnist using Twitter to share his thoughts concerning a proposed boycott of the Arizona Diamondbacks? (“just wish true fans would seek alternative ways of protesting other than boycotting games”) See, not as awesome as Marty taking the night off to watch Season One of “Dollhouse” on DVD, is it? Whatever the source of MLB’s anxiety, we can only guess, as NBC.com’s Aaron Gleeman reports the league ” is cracking down on Twitter usage, ordering MLB.com writers to cease tweeting about all non-baseball topics and scolding players for their Twitter usage in general.”
Allowing the writers and players to show a bit of personality and interact with fans/readers was a positive thing and certainly caused me to become a fan of those who did it well.
Certainly setting standards for the type of content MLB employees post on Twitter is reasonable, but simply banning all non-baseball talk for MLB.com writers and preemptively scolding players who’ve done nothing wrong is … well, it’s just a real shame.
Under most circumstances, I’d agree with Gleeman. I fancy myself something of a free speech advocate and it’s hard to see any upside to stifling the creativity of ballplayers and writers alike.
However, if that’s what it takes to shut up this motherfucker nu-media menace for once and all, I’m all for it. It’s a small price to pay.