Twitter Overkill

Reporting from the Jock-o-Sphere: Twittering is a great service for connecting with athletes. But they can over-connect.

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Twitter = mindless chatter? Proponents would point to this man.

Remember when a sports fan could only complain to his buddies on the couch? With Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere, we are oftentimes bombarded by commentary before you ever even tap into media. You don't have to look far to see a whole stream of regurgitation about a game: just pop open your Twitter or news feed and there's more than you can stomach. Even from the athletes themselves.

Like Monday night.

Charlie Villanueva, he of tweeting-in-the-locker-room-and-getting-in-trouble-for-it fame, was an oversharing offender during the NCAA National Championship game. He dropped 20 updates as North Carolina rolled on Michigan State. Most of them were aimed at the Spartans' woeful play, as Villanueva, a UConn fan who played for Jim Calhoun, lamented about his team not making it to the title game.

A few samples:

"Ok I'm a little bitter, uconn belongs in this game."

"Msu coming back.............you have a better chance seeing me with a afro tomorrow, than msu winning this game."

"How did uconn lose to this sorry team, shows how much they didn't belong there."

As you can see, Villanueva was not a happy camper, and his nearly 18,000 followers were subjected to his ire repeatedly on Monday.

We all want more access to athletes. But sometimes, we can also do without it.

We're now two weeks into Keith Olbermann's "Baseball Nerd" blog and he's kept pace, updating nearly every day. Over the weekend, he attended the first ever game at New Yankee Stadium -- an exhibition between the Yanks and the Cubs -- and he made these observations:

"For your record-keeping pleasure, Aaron Miles got the first exhibition hit in the place, Derek Jeter the first Yankee safety, Robinson Cano the first home run," he writes. "The first celebrity in the stands was Paul Simon - and parenthetically he sat through the whole rainy magilla. And, yes, as suggested Thursday, the ball rockets to right field. Cano, Matsui, and Cody Ransom hit bullet home runs off Ted Lilly (notice: two lefties going to the shortened-by-wind short-porch in right off a lefty) and Miles and Reed Johnson both rattled extra-base hits into the corner. It's going to be a take-it-to-RF ballpark."

Rod Benson's Polish teammate, Cezary Trybanski, knows English well enough. But sometimes, it's not always so easy for him. Like when he's in a loud bar with music playing, and a guy with a raspy, hard-to-understand voice starts propositioning him to go to a hot tub after the bar.

Rod to the rescue!

"The guy started a sentence I didn't need to hear the end of," he writes. "I took off running, Cezary right there with me until we were on the other side of the bar. Right then, as if he had teleported over, the guy was right behind us.

"'April fools, man. April fools, man,' he was yelling at us in his raspy, nasty Ken Kaniff voice.

"I told him to step off. I didn't believe him. It wasn't even April Fools day, for one. Secondly, you cant run an April Fools joke on someone who doesn't speak English. Whatever. Moral of the story is that I now have to watch over the Polish guy so that nobody takes advantage of him."

You may remember last week when we covered Mark Cuban's stance that his tweets have a copyright and therefore weren't allowed to be republished by a news outlet. (He's right on the first part, wrong on the second.)

Cuban still has Twitter on the mind, as he recently wrote a whole post about the service's pros and cons:

"The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity," he writes. "It works perfectly and quickly on a phone. Translated, its the ultimate time waster for the 30-plus generation. You are never bored when you have a phone and Twitter, no matter where you are. That's the key to its success."

Cuban nails it here: Twitter is easy to use, it's quick; you're never bored if you've got it going. But as our Villanueva example showed, that doesn't always mean it's a good thing.

This season, Curtis Granderson's blog has found its way over to Yahoo! In his first entry for Big League Stew, Granderson touches on the tough times for fans in the city of Detroit:

"As players, of course we want to win," he writes. "But it hurt even more to see the fans hurt. They had so much hope for us last year, and now with the economy and unemployment situation in Detroit, it makes us want to win that much more. Our fans in Detroit are as good as they come. They support us no matter what. They haven't had much to cheer about in the past year outside of the Red Wings winning the Stanley Cup last year and Michigan State's Final Four run this year."

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