Twitter Twits Missing Baseball's Essence

Baseball is a pastoral game.  It is a long haul. Short term results are not necessarily indicative of the success or failure of a team at the end.  There are a lot of ups and downs; slumps and hot streaks and no one or no team is immune.

http://www.wiedemannbeer.com/

Yet popularity of social media that allows the knee-jerk reactions of fans leads to an overabundance of negativity.  Because people express themselves immediately, they tweet some ignorant things without thinking them through.

Every writer gets them.  Some are just so stupid it is really laughable.

One of the big criticisms is the Reds' record against teams with winning records.

"We have some big series on this road trip," said Baker of the Reds' upcoming journey to Arizona, Oakland and Texas. "All three are either in first or second place and trying to stay there or move up."

When a writer brought up the Reds' losing record against winning teams, Baker's reaction was, "So."

"So?  We have a winning record, killing everybody else, isn't that the same?  Plus, how many games have we played against (winning teams)?  We played these guys (Pirates) 11 times (actually 10th today).  We played the Cardinals, what nine times? We had a losing record to everybody on the road too, didn't we.  They were panicking."

The Reds lost eight of its first nine road games.  They are now 18-16 on the road.

"People can find a negative in anything," Baker said.  "Now what if we were losing to the bad teams and beating the good teams, you know? I deal in the positive.  I think we're doing pretty damn good, not to be at full forces.  We're not doing great.  Our guys are doing better than a lot of teams."

Someone mentioned the Reds have the second-best record in baseball as of Thursday morning. Only the Reds and Cardinals are playing .600 baseball.

"Yeah, what the hell!" Baker said.  "What do you want?"

It was mentioned that the St. Louis writers showed us some negative tweets from their fans while the Cardinals were playing at an unsustainable .650 clip.

"That (tweets) are the worst things that have ever happened," Baker said.

Baker agreed with the writer who said, "It is an immediate reaction in a sport that does not lend itself to immediate reactions."

"In baseball, you can get pissed off every other day," Baker said.  "Look, the Cardinals are doing pretty good and they lost two or three to the Marlins and I told Marty (Brennaman) that when they went down there.  You're supposed to beat them but there's no guarantees.  They can play you tough.  We played teams tough when we weren't as good."

Professionally edited by ML Schirmer
for proof reading services call
513-240-3120