Joe Buck deleted his Twitter account last May. I finally understood why in October.
In an interview with The Big Lead last week, Buck offered this explanation:
I found I was spending a lot of my time on it, and I found it was not as productive as I wanted it to be. I would engage the haters … and I finally just gave up on trying to turn the tide one hater at a time. When I would engage people, they’d turn in one second. On some level, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I think people just want to be heard. You understand that going in … but it started to seep into my performance and it started to affect how I was doing games because I would have it open as I was doing the games … that wasn’t good for me. I don’t think it’d be good for anybody. I think you have to do your games how you want to do them, and let people like it or not like it.
Fans don’t like Buck and I can’t understand why.
I was following the conversation of Game 3 of the World Series Friday night when the obligatory 140-character Buck-shot was fired. In my curiosity I asked, “Why? Why do baseball fans hate Buck and (Tim) McCarver?” The response: “Because they’re awful.” Well, if you know me, you know that answer is unacceptable. So I probed further asking, “Can you be more specific? That’s a general statement.” And, here’s the rest of the conversation …
Sorry, Mike, but you are in the minority. The latest Twitter stats claim there are 277, 559,746 registered accounts (then factor in SPAM, bots and registered accounts that are inactive). The global world population is 6.97 billion people. That means, roughly 3.9% of the world is on Twitter. The numbers who tweet baseball narrows the field more. The number of people who hate professional sports announcers, and tweet about it, reduce the field to a short list.
Don’t get me wrong, I like and follow Mike Petriello. He is a great baseball fan. I am only using our conversation as an example of a Twitter culture that can be discouraging at times.
What frustrates me with Buck is we’ve lost a voice, one with exceptional knowledge and wit, a baseball insider who could have offered a lot of insight on Twitter. I don’t love Joe Buck, but I don’t hate him either. I do respect his work, his knowledge and his passion for the game of baseball. I liked having Joe Buck on Twitter. When he wasn’t swatting away criticism he provided insight to you and I — sports fans — who enjoy devouring every morsel of knowledge.
Good riddance, says the fan after Buck deleted his Twitter account. I say, thanks for nothing fans. You ran off one of the good ones.
