Respect the Baseball Moms

Social media is hell.

This is generally accepted as fact in 2019, yet we all keep coming back to this hellscape where everyone is awful and everything is bad.

It is one thing entirely to defend oneself from the constant, general negativity, let alone the weird, personal attacks leveraged by face-less logo-mashup avatars over nothing more than a lukewarm opinion.

If you are reading this, you are aware of the recklessness of sports-Twitter. If not, here’s a crash course:

Cool!

Imagine, if you will, being the parent of one of these people. If you are a parent already, you probably already know the irrational level of anger you feel that time the other kid at the daycare shoved your kid down on the playground. I don’t have kids, so I don’t know that feeling, or if daycares even have playgrounds, but I have heard this anger first hand.

The intersection of parenting and social media would be my own personal Bad Place, as I do not have the level of maturity it takes to be a parent, much less watch thousands of untalented nobodies boost their own lacking self worth by talking smack on my imaginary child.

Luckily, some do.

The 2019 season for the Indians has produced plenty of unexpected storylines, but perhaps the most unexpected has been the emergence of baseball moms, and our #TribeMoms. The emergence of the women in players’ lives on social media has brought plenty of clapping back, and frankly, we’re here for it.

Even if we have been on the wrong side of it.

Was it particularly vicious tweet? No. Was it a well-founded criticism? Probably. Was it a beacon sent up to say that the #TribeMoms are watching, and we should be on our best behavior? Absolutely.

Actually, we get that question a lot from #TribeMoms. Like this from the mom of former Indians relief prospect J.P. Feyereisen when we placed a bit too much blame on the bullpen.

Sometimes the moms get sassy, like that of Nick Goody. And you know what? Good!

The fan code seems to say that athletes are fair game. “They signed up for this,” “It’s a part of the job,” etc.

You know who did not sign up for this? The moms. The people who sacrificed all of their hopes and dreams to pass that on to their children. The people who leave work and go directly to the t-ball games instead of taking time for themselves.

Wednesday night, a tweet about Indians closer Brad Hand being unavailable turned into much more.

After Mrs. Hand sent the passive-aggressive shot-across-the-bow to @_hoss, it was then time for the original Mrs. Hand to step in, giving us one of the better Twitter threads of the season.

Then Mrs. Hand hit us all with a little humility that only a mom, especially the #TribeMoms, could.

God bless you, Momma Hand, and God bless all the baseball moms out there.