Word leaked out last night that Josh Thole shut down his Twitter account. Thole was not a particularly active or interesting Twitterer, and, to be honest, I’m not sure I can remember a single thing he Tweeted. But he was notable as one of the few Mets who Tweeted in a language I can read (though I know enough Spanish to figure out that this means Johan Santana saw Fast Five, which is awesome).
Anyway, Thole told reporters he grew sick of seeing his inbox flooded with “ruthless” comments from Mets fans after bad games. He said he received at least one actual death wish, and he just didn’t want to deal with it anymore.
Now you might expect Twitter would take Thole’s departure as a cue for some quiet introspection, a moment to look in the mirror and consider the perpetual 140-character negativity. You’d be wrong though:
Yes, it has long been theorized that maintaining a Twitter account requires a good deal of mental toughness, what with macho handles like “OG” and “the Bull” and all. And indeed, after Thole let reporters know about his decision, tweets questioning the catcher’s backbone flooded timelines everywhere.
But inquisitive journalist and social-media guru that I am, I endeavored some very scientific research on the matter. I surveyed a significant sample of humanity on its Twitter habits as well as a litany of things that indicate mental toughness. Check out this graph:
As so often happens, science disproves popular belief. It turns out for the large majority of humanity, there is no relationship between Twitter usage and mental toughness. There are a bunch of mentally weak people using Twitter and a bunch of mentally weak people not using Twitter. The only time you see any change is when you get to the very extreme end of the mental toughness spectrum. Really ridiculously tough people don’t use Twitter because they need their hands to do things like wrestle bears and defuse bombs, and many of them don’t have smartphones.
Sometimes Josh Thole has 95 mile-an-hour fastballs fouled off his facemask. Then he leans back in to to do it again. If you want to call that guy mentally weak because he doesn’t want to put up with a bunch of b.s. from fans on Twitter, go to town, bro, but smart money says he doesn’t really care much one way or the other.
It’s classic self-important talk-radio Benigno thinking to latch on to any example you can find of a player reacting in some small way to outside pressure and cite it as evidence that he can’t handle the city or the media, when in truth — if I had to guess, at least — if the player is paying any attention whatsoever he sees it only as some sort of macabre sideshow.
Baseball players have tons of stuff to occupy their attention, what with the scouting meetings and the traveling and the charity work and the actually playing baseball games and everything else. In Spring Training, Thole found a little extra time and decided to try out Twitter. People, as they so often do, behaved like animals, so he bailed. All that means about his character is he’s reasonable.
Oh, speaking of reasonable: If you’re on Twitter and you’re interested in maintaining the ability to directly interact with baseball players — the great value of Twitter — I suggest you follow our man Glenn’s lead and say nice things to Justin Turner.
Tedquarters 