I should probably move
on from this. A friend tweeted me that it’s already old news and any attempt to
write about it only extends the knowledge of it anyway. Still, blogs are where
things like this belong and I need to get this off my chest for the last time.
We all are familiar
with Twitter. It’s the 21st century version of a conversation. Well,
it seems that now-Mets prospect, Noah Syndergaard,
was having a conversation with a friend and commented about his shoes, saying: “nice
crocs fag lol”. It’s the kind of thing anyone his age would say as a joke;
however, in this case, it was done over the internet.
Instantly Syndergaard
became ‘A Person of Interest’ and someone must have advised him to take the
tweet down (which he did). Too late. Nothing ever goes away on the internet and
nothing seems to be worth ignoring by Andy Martino of
the New York Daily News. The online story became so viral that the Mets issued
a statement that they “were looking into the matter” and eventually had
Syndergaard apologize for his tweet during his first telephone press conference
with the local news media (that included Martino).
Was this necessary? Is
this news worthy, especially as the opening volley between a beat reporter and
a new ballplayer? Comments on the NYDN piece range from: “fag doesn't even mean
gay any more for younger people. It's far more closely related to
"silly" or "weird" to “I was over it before I even finished
the article.”
I come from a different
era involving all this. My old school thinking believes that certain topics and
incidents should be left on the table and unwritten. No one jumped all over the
initial signs on illness when George Steinbrenner began
to slide downhill. We were shocked at some of the non-sports related things we
heard (and saw) about, but our job was to report the sports news, not tell you
who bedded down whom the night before, or comments made in the clubhouse.
Mark Healey, of MHealeySports, wrote today that the
“hammering new kid for a dopey tweet and subsequent kid glove treatment of Wilpons
makes NY media look small… be nice if the people who cover the Mets made as a
big a deal about $63 OD nosebleed tix as they did about some 20-year old's
tweet”.
Did you notice the lack
of spelling here? See, this isn’t Associated Press language. It’s a tweet. From
Twitter. And it’s public, which Syndergaard now realizes is up for grabs, but
making your opening story about his description of a pair of shoes instead of
last year’s WHIP is just, well, it’s just… gay.
That’s an expression
Andy. That’s all it is. It’s not a story and you certainly are better than this.
I asked Martino why he
felt it was necessary to turn this into a story, but he didn’t respond.
To my tweet.
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