Teams’ Twitter accounts get into some good natured banter from time to time. Sometimes over generic rivalry things. Sometimes the winning team will give a gentle “in your face” to the losing team. Most of the time it’s pretty bland, but there’s almost always at least a bit of sassiness to it, in keeping with what has become he norms with corporate social media accounts which try to seem a bit more edgy than they really are. You can thank Wendy’s for that, probably.
Over the weekend the Tampa Bay Rays swept the Miami Marlins. Despite the loss, after the game on Sunday the Marlins account tweeted a Brian Anderson highlight. Hey, it was a good play! Seemed to be worth a tweet!
HE'S THE MAN YOUR THIRD BASE COACH WARNED YOU ABOUT. #JuntosMiami pic.twitter.com/2oqQBINs2s
— Miami Marlins (@Marlins) August 4, 2019
At this point the Rays account butted in to -- in my view, anyway -- rather obnoxiously yell “scoreboard":
Can we note at this point that it’s rather rich for the Rays -- who have a pretty long history of citing rather dubious accomplishments with pride -- to be playing the “only the final results matter” card? This is the team that recently bragged about how it took the Yankees extra innings to beat them, as if that’s a point of pride. They have a banner for winning the Wild Card and recently tweeted about how it had the best record in baseball over a 162-game span spread over two seasons. They are the masters of the “hey, we did good for us in a thing that did not matter” game, yet here they are crapping on the Marlins for being happy about a cool thing that happened in a loss? Please.
I wish the Marlins had taken that tack to criticize the Rays -- maybe posted photos of their two World Series banners next to the Rays Wild Card banner or something -- but, alas, they did not. They kinda took it to an extreme.
Crikey, that’s harsh. It’s been 13 years but still, man, too soon.
Since then the Marlins have apologized:
Hi, guys. Like everyone who grew up watching him, we miss Steve. We’re so sorry to have made light of his passing.
— Miami Marlins (@Marlins) August 5, 2019
The team additionally issued a statement saying that the social media folks got a little out of hand and that the matter was handled internally. Which, OK, fair. It was in poor taste. And now let everyone move on.
Still: maybe the Rays social media folks can just let people enjoy things? Is that too much to ask? If they do, we’ll even allow them to raise a “We Let People Enjoy Things: 2019" banner. It’d be right up their alley.
