Rarely does a baseball clubhouse resemble a traditional office setting in any way, shape or form.
There’s the hours, the dress code, and of course the fact that ballplayers are allowed to spit in their office. I’m pretty sure if a banker tried showing up to work at 1 p.m. in his pajamas spitting tobacco juice on the ground of his cubicle, he wouldn’t be a banker for much longer.
Which is why it was refreshing to see a familiar traditional office battle playing out in the Marlins’ clubhouse recently — how to control employees’ use of social media.
Marlins management, including team owner Jeffrey Loria and team president Larry Beinfest, have reportedly told Morrison to tone down his notoriously outspoken Twitter feed. For those of you who don’t follow Morrison, he is one of the more entertaining sports personalities — journalists included — to follow on Twitter because he seemingly doesn’t care about what anyone thinks of him. For example, Morrison tweeted this gem a few hours ago:
“What is a horse shoe? What does a horse shoe do? Are there any horse socks? Is anybody listening to me?”
It has nothing to do with baseball or anything, just a completely random thought that was running through his head that he felt needed to be shared with the world. And quite frankly, it was brilliant. It’s also the perfect example of why Loria and Beinfest need to leave him alone when it comes to his social media presence.
The Marlins have, by all accounts, much bigger fish to fry than Morrison’s Twitter feed if you’ll pardon the pun. Their manager just resigned less than halfway through his first season, the team is currently riding the crest of an 11-game losing streak, and attendance is routinely below the 15,000 mark, probably the only thing that could make Sun Life Stadium feel even more cavernous. None of these things bode well for a team about to move into a $515 million ballpark partially funded by taxpayer dollars and is hoping to generate some momentum to win over a market that is notoriously fickle when it comes to profsesional sports.
Morrison’s Twitter feed is, sadly, one of the few things that is even remotely entertaining about this organization. It gives people a reason to buy in to the Marlins brand, gives them a reason to care because the product on the field sure as hell isn’t. His 38,831 followers would constitute an overflow crowd at the new ballpark as well as (technically) at Sun Life Stadium, which lists an official capacity of 38,560 for baseball although it can actually fit about double that.
While his feed is whimsical and at times odd, there’s nothing about it that is truly caustic when it comes to criticizing his bosses. He waxes poetic about not being able to get a room service lullaby, funny videos he’s seen, and interacts with both fans and detractors. Morrison is, in short, a very very good thing for a team that could use a very, very good thing right about now. And as long as he refrains from using his wildly popular feed to openly criticize teammates and his superiors, he should be encouraged to continue doing whatever it is he’s doing.
If Loria and Beinfest know what’s best for the organization, they’ll opt to leave it alone. You won’t see guys like Derek Jeter, Cliff Lee, Tim Hudson or Alex Rodriguez posting the random byproducts of their minds on Twitter. It’s time for Major League Baseball, its teams and players to embrace the social media revolution, to use it to interact with fans who otherwise might not care to go to a game.
While in the league’s infancy, fans felt like they knew their favorite stars because in many cases, they actually did, the modern era has left us with a disconnect between the game’s stars and their fans. Twitter helps bridge that, however slightly.
