He’s too busy managing a baseball team to iron out the details of how it would work, but Cubs manager Joe Maddon wishes we could bifurcate social media somehow. Separate the positive from the negative, never shall the two mingle.
The problem is, as Maddon sees it and as many others would agree, for whatever positive intentions there might have been at the founding of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the bad outweighs the good. Social media can seem more often like a source of narcissism and negativity than anything else, and for public-facing figures like baseball managers and players that creates a strain.
“It could be utilized so wonderfully in the right settings, but it gets exploited like anything else does,” Maddon said.
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The good parts are easy to name: Keeping up with friends and family, following the news, engaging with personal interests. In a major league clubhouse, it’s not uncommon to see players scrolling through their feeds before a game. They joke with each other about a meme or a video, check in with friends on other teams, and keep an eye on the goings-on of family members they don’t get to see as often during the baseball season.
But with that comes the ugly underbelly of social media that all people experience. For the players whose daily performance and activity is the subject of vast public scrutiny and analysis, it can be a source of distraction and negativity.
Most of them work to tune it out, but that’s not always easy. A “you suck” in their mentions after a bad night is one thing, but seeing that repeated by dozens of people is another. And that’s a tame example. Many of them have seen much worse. Because professional athletes are so much different from the rest of us in a lot of ways, it might be easy to think that they handle social media vitriol differently, but they don’t.
“Some get affected or upset by what someone else says,” said Jeffrey Fishbein, a sports psychologist who has worked with several MLB teams.
Fishbein has had to work with players on how they handle the negativity directed at them. His advice is probably useful for everyone, but it breaks down to three things: 1) Minimize the time spent on social media. 2) Minimize the emotional investment in what goes on there. 3) Don’t respond to negativity. But if you do, don’t do it too quickly.
“Take some time and let it breathe a little bit before you do any responding,” Fishbein tells players.
Social media has revolutionized communication, especially when it comes to public figures. For athletes, fans have an avenue to communicate directly, for good and for bad. To some degree, that’s broken down a barrier that used to exist between the two and created a false sense of closeness.
“It’s turning into a thing where I think it’s tricked people into thinking that their opinion is welcomed or, for lack of a better word, matters,” Twins pitcher Jake Odorizzi said.
And there are a lot of opinions, from fans and from media. Many of them can be ignored, but sometimes players find it cathartic to respond in some way. Sometimes just retweeting a really nasty comment for all to see is enough, Fishbein said. Other times, players go a step further, such as Christian Yelich tweeting “Relax Roxane” to a woman aghast at ESPN Body Issue pictures of him. Or Yu Darvish correcting a Chicago TV personality who tagged him in tweets incorrectly dissecting his pitch selection.
But most of the time, the best thing for them is to try to shut it out.
For Cubs outfielder Nick Castellanos, that means staying away from Twitter altogether — he’s never had it and called it “a disaster waiting to happen” — and keeping the Instagram app on his girlfriend’s phone. He doesn’t have it on his, and he leaves the posting to her.
“I don’t pay any attention to it,” Castellanos said of his lone social media profile. “I mean, I appreciate all the cheers, you know, thank you for loving me. But if you want to boo me, go right ahead. And if you leave something on my social media, go right ahead too, because I’m probably not going to see it.”
He estimates that 90 percent of the time he spends on his phone is just to call people or listen to music. Otherwise, he’s not touching it. Like a lot of people, Castellanos recognizes that phone addiction is real, so he does everything he can to stay off his as much as possible.
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There are others who have adopted similar approaches. Castellanos’ teammate Kyle Hendricks used to have a public Twitter account but deactivated it years ago because he said that the negatives outweighed any positives and because the act of posting updates on himself felt unnatural.
“It’s just really not me. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. It felt forced,” Hendricks said. “I didn’t want to force something that was social if that’s really not me. I’d rather do things in person.”
Now, he has a private account that he doesn’t tweet from and that he uses only to do some of the things for which social media was intended. Hendricks likes following the news and sports on Twitter, but he’s also into space and animals. And, of course, the temporary diversion of things that make him laugh.
“Just take me away, and then I can go about my business, go about my life,” Hendricks said.
Most baseball players say that they would prefer to just not be on social media at all — Twitter in particular — but sometimes they don’t have that luxury. Cubs utilityman David Bote had no social media accounts when he broke into the majors last year, but when he vaulted to fame with a walk-off grand slam against the Nationals last August, his hand was forced. Fans started setting up accounts posing as him, and his agent recommended getting an account and having it verified so Bote could avoid confusion or even scandal.
Astros outfielder George Springer was the same way. He had no social media presence until shortly after Houston won the World Series in 2017. In November of that year, his agent saw that someone had set up an account posing as Springer to raise money for Hurricane Harvey. Whether that person’s intentions were honest or not, the risk to Springer’s reputation was enough for him to create Twitter and Instagram accounts and have them verified. And then his approach was to post just once from the two accounts and then never again.
Otherwise, Springer gives it none of his attention.
“I (couldn't) care less what’s going on on the internet. It’s a much different day and age. I’m not very old by any means, but when I was a kid it was more go play outside and enjoy each other’s company,” Springer said. “Now it’s, ‘Let’s go to Instagram Live and see what this guy’s doing and that guy’s doing.’ I understand the concept of it, but I just personally don’t care enough about what’s going on with other people for me to have it.”
Springer doesn’t like being on his phone at all, he said, and he doesn’t have the apps for either Twitter or Instagram and doesn’t even know the passwords for his accounts. Springer said he had social media when he was younger, but didn’t like it.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there where people think they’re somebody that they’re not, and they do all this stuff for what? For attention? You don’t need it,” Springer said. “Go live your life the way that you want to live it. So that’s why I stay off of it and enjoy my life the way I want to do it.”
He has talked to teammates about social media, and Springer said that a few of them have privately expressed that they wish they could just shut their accounts down and walk away. Pitcher Collin McHugh might be among those.
McHugh has been outspoken and open on Twitter at times, but said he increasingly sees the appeal of logging off. Long breaks from his social accounts are good, he said.
“It gets overwhelming at times, and for me I have to disconnect every once in a while and pull back,” McHugh said.
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McHugh and other players know that much of the content on social media is of negligible importance, despite the amplification of, say, a chicken sandwich war. For events that really do matter, McHugh isn’t worried about missing them because he’s not on Twitter.
“If something happens in the world, I’ll know about it. I’ll see it on the actual news,” McHugh said. “It’s not something that’s going to fly by.”
But taking breaks isn’t always enough, so a lot of players have shut down their accounts completely. Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward abandoned Twitter in 2016 but has kept Instagram. The former, Heyward said, just got to be too much.
“Just tired of reading peoples’ thoughts on whatever, and it’s like, OK, that’s not logical, that’s not whatever,” Heyward said. “I don’t want to tweet any words. If I want to say something, I’ll say it in my own way, not via Twitter.”
He calls Instagram “an encyclopedia of pictures” and likes the ease it creates in following his interests, such as family and friends, tattoos, travel, food and cars. But even there, Heyward is bothered by the lack of genuineness that he sometimes sees, the carefully filtered and even doctored photos that create an image that’s false. The new way of keeping up with the Joneses, Heyward said, is on social media.
How players and managers treat social media often comes from how they’re wired. Odorizzi said that he’s not a very outspoken person to begin with, so his quiet Twitter account is just a reflection of that. He likes following the Tampa Bay Lightning because he’s a fan, but otherwise he doesn’t share his private life on the platform.
“I feel like when it stretches over into your private life, nothing’s a secret anymore. Nothing’s just to your family,” Odorizzi said.
His manager, Rocco Baldelli, is similar. He doesn’t have Facebook or Instagram, he said, and rarely tweets (“I’m not a giver on social media,” he joked.). He likes following music and current events because the cocoon of the baseball season can get isolating.
“There’s not a lot of time to converse and get out there and do anything because most of our lives are kind of tucked in the ballfield,” Baldelli said. “It’s just an easy way to figure out what’s up.”
Managers have a somewhat different experience because the feedback they get is often tied to strategy, not performance or execution. Baldelli joked that his father would have a hard time not responding to every critic, but it’s never something he’s felt compelled to do. He doesn’t look at his mentions often.
Maddon will sometimes take a peek, though.
“I have it, I’ll get online, and I see some of the inane commentary. I actually giggle a lot, I think it’s pretty funny,” he said.
But it’s not all easy to brush off.
“The point that really boggles my mind is how you would write something awful or bad about somebody you’ve never met. There’s no dog in the race. What are you trying to accomplish with this? It’s really a breeding ground of a lot of negativity and bad feelings. … Why is that good?”
In the end, the best approach for players and managers might be what Fishbein suggests: Don’t spend too much time in the virtual swirl of news and commentary. But when you do, ignore most of it and don’t respond to negativity.
In fact, rather than getting caught up in what others are writing about them, Fishbein has encouraged players to be their own authors. He tells them to sit down and write their own articles, either before a game as a kind of visualization or after as a way of gleaning something positive from their day, no matter how well or how poorly it went. As a general rule, he gives them advice that would behoove everyone to follow.
“Don’t rely on the thoughts of other people to provide you with any sort of self-worth, self-esteem,” Fishbein said, “because that’s just never going to consistently yield what you’re looking for.”