Twitter, Mother Jokes, and the Florida Marlins

What I love about Twitter is that it’s opened — I mean swung wide open — the lines of communication; it’s put all of us on the same digital page. Have a favorite team? Follow its beat writer. Actually, follow your favorite beat writer. They’re all tweeting; posting lineups, plugging stories and blog posts, and dropping other useful nuggets of information. Twitter’s become part of the job. I work in a newsroom, albeit not a traditional breaking news kind of newsroom, and it’s become part of our jobs, as producers, too. It’s crazy. (And, before I forget, peep this piece by Dave Kindred, at SportsJournalism.org, about beat writing, and how technology — Twitter, iPhones, iPads, and RIM’s BlackBerry — has changed it. It’s fantastic.)

Twitter’s given each of us a direct platform to communicate with those whose job it is to cover and write about our favourite baseball teams. Have a question? Ask away; no question is too stupid (as evidenced above), and Twitter’s even easier than email. And me, a news junkie, a journalist, I love to see that kind of interaction between a journalist and the public he or she is serving. That’s what this profession’s all about.

So you can imagine my delight in reading the Twitter exchange above, between South Florida Sun Sentinal Florida Marlins beat writer Juan Rodriguez, @JCRMarlinsbeat, and Marlins fan Robinson Crawford, @1134209, whose Twitter bio, which serves as a window into his soul, reads, “thug means never having to say you’re sorry.” (You learn something everyday.) The back-and-forth, question-and-answer is the essence of Twitter, the reason why it was created, and, even more importantly, proves true what we’ve been reading and hearing so far this off-season: The Marlins are going to be very aggressive in free agency, and will leave no door unopened in their quest to find talent. You never know: Moms might be the new Moneyball. It’s going to be a busy, and exciting, winter down in Miami.

Follow FanGraphs’ @brandonwarne52. His Twitter account, and his excellent judgement in retweeting, is the reason I read the Rodriguez tweet.