Freelance Sports Journalist
Twenty years from now this will be a Trivial Pursuit question: Who was the first player in Major League Baseball to tweet during a game? Flip the card and the answer will say — Matt Kemp of the Los Angeles Dodgers. At Tuesday night’s All-Star Game in Kansas City, @TheRealMattKemp fired off the first player tweet:
Last night, baseballs were flying all over Kaufmann Stadium in Kansas City. Tonight, there will be so many tweets and hashtags flying during the 83rd annual Major League Baseball All-Star Game it may not feel like Kansas anymore. MLB will unleash the All-Star teams from both the American and National Leagues on social media tonight. Toto too? OK, I’ll stop with the Wizard of Oz references.
I remember the first time I met Josh Hamilton. He walked slowly up the steps, through the box seats behind home plate at Joseph P. Riley Jr. park in Charleston, South Carolina. He was wearing a gray Tampa Bay Devil Rays t-shirt and white game pants.
Hamilton was clean shaven with curly brown hair – and not a single tattoo. He dropped into one of the empty box seats on a hot, humid July 4 late afternoon in South Carolina and propped his massive feet on the seat in front of him. That’s what I remember most: his massive feet.
Linda and Tony Hamilton returned to North Carolina, leaving Josh in Bradenton, Florida, to recover and resume his climb to the major leagues. For the first time in his life Hamilton was alone.
He struggled through the 2001 season, playing in just 27 games. Hamilton spent most of the 2002 season on the disabled list, battling a variety of injuries, including lingering back problems. By July he was sidelined for the season to undergo back and elbow surgery. The Devil Rays anticipated Hamilton’s arrival for spring training 2003.
Hamilton is 25 years old, the last four felt like a lifetime.
His mind once blurred by drugs and alcohol, his body abused by a serious car accident, tattoos and cigarette burn scars on his skin, Hamilton is trying to pick up the pieces of his life and a promising career as a major league baseball player. On Tuesday, June 8, 1999, Josh and his parents, Tony and Linda Hamilton, and 50 friends and members of the media camped out at Hamilton’s home in Raleigh, N.C., waiting for the phone to ring. The room was filled with quiet anticipation.
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