I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…

– Bills reciever Stevie Johnson, via Twitter.

You’ve probably seen Johnson’s postgame Tweet by now and have read all about how he lashed out at higher powers after a dropped touchdown pass. And odds are you enjoyed a good chuckle.

Twitter is a strange and funny place. Reporters use it to break news, some people try to convey reasonably complex opinions in 140 characters, and some — this guy, say — mostly use it to make jokes and solicit restaurant recommendations.

But most people — or maybe just most people I follow — seem to use it primarily as some sort of emotional sounding board, sort of an open IM to the world of their instantaneous reactions to the news the reporters just broke or whatever just happened on their TVs. And 140 characters are plenty for that.

And with more and more athletes signing on to Twitter, fans (and journalists, for that matter) gain a type of access to players that I’m not sure ever before existed. We are presented emotion unfiltered by newspapers and the postgame cliche fomalities, and insight into players’ lives outside their sport. A few feeds are obviously operated by publicists. Of the others, some turn out to be interesting. Others not so much.

Regardless, as I learn more about a player — even if it’s just the way he consciously chooses to portray himself to the world — I find that a funny thing happens: I feel like I actually know them, and because when push comes to shove I generally like the people I know, I start rooting for them in a different way than I would a guy whom I’d just seen in a few boring postgame interviews or read quotes from in a newspaper.

C.J. Wilson comes out to start a World Series game, I don’t just think, “hey here’s a lefty who converted from reliever to starter and had a pretty good season,” I think, “oh hey, it’s @str8edgeracer! I have a pretty decent sense of what this dude’s about, and even though we don’t have a ton of overlapping interests outside of baseball, I hope he succeeds because he seems like a decent dude.” Except I don’t really think it out in words like that; that would be weird.

I know now that Mark Sanchez, Dustin Keller and Nick Mangold like to rip on each other, and that Keller and especially Mangold make plenty of time to interact with fans (Sanchez, presumably, is busy eating Taco Bell, and that’s cool too). I know that Marlins first baseman Logan Morrison is a legitimately hilarious dude, and that Blue Jays outfielder Travis Snider — a man of my own heart — uses the handle @lunchboxhero45 and almost exclusively Tweets about food.

And now I know that Stevie Johnson is a bit of a bugout, prone to meet adversity with overreaction and vaguely existential meltdowns. I know people like that. And hey, we’re all human — his outburst only makes me like him more. Hell, I’ve spent plenty of time myself irrationally wondering if I were being punished for something. I feel you, Stevie Johnson.

So I fear that when the public at large reacts the way it did to Johnson’s freakout — ranging from mockery to sanctimony, but an undoubtedly loud response — we risk forcing athletes to become as guarded in this forum as they are in others. That’s a shame, because candid ballplayers interacting with fans in a public forum benefits all parties involved.

And look: I realize that Johnson’s outburst is indeed funny, and that the public overreacting to, well, public overreaction is pretty much inevitable, so I’m pretty much tilting at windmills here. Plus obviously an absurd tirade is a very different use of Twitter than Sanchez and Keller trading embarrassing photos, and that an athlete using the site responsibly will face no criticism.

I just worry that as more teams’ brass and media-relations types see the response to Johnson’s meltdown, “responsibly” will come to mean “blandly.” And that stinks, because I really like hearing about all the ridiculous things Travis Snider is eating.