Yankees' Twitter feed ignored A-Rod home run
On Wednesday afternoon, Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez continued his surprisingly successful return from last season’s suspension by hitting his first home run of the spring. He is 5-for-11 (.455) with a double, a homer, two walks and two strikeouts thus far.
If you were following the game online and keeping track of the action on Twitter, it was impossible not to know about A-Rod’s homer. Unless you were relying on the Yankees official Twitter account. They ignored the homer completely. Here’s their feed during the game:
A-Rod’s homer was the team’s third run of the game, so any sort of acknowledgement tweet would have come between the Dellin Betances tweet and the “Yankees trail 5-3 as we enter the 6th” tweet. The team did manage to acknowledge non-roster invitee Slade Heathcott’s ninth inning dinger though.
There’s no mention of A-Rod at all. Not during the game or even in the game recap tweet. In fact, scroll back through the team’s Twitter feed and the only time they mention Rodriguez is in the daily lineup tweets. You have to go all the way back to September 2013 — the last time he played — to find a tweet from the Yankees acknowledging something A-Rod did on the field.
It’s no secret the only reason Rodriguez is still with the Yankees are the three years and $60-something million left on his contract. So clearly the team has some of vendetta against their disgraced slugger, right? Well, no. Apparently yesterday’s ommission was just a mistake. Mark Feinsand of the New York Daily News got to the bottom of it:
Are the Yankees trying to pretend A-Rod isn’t part of the team? That doesn’t appear to be the case. As it turns out, the Yankees don’t even control the account.
“It was very much an unintended error,” a team spokesman said. “Alex is and will be treated like every other Yankees player.”
According to a source, there was no directive from the team to omit A-Rod from the Twitter account, which is run by MLB Advanced Media, the league’s digital arm. Unlike many clubs, the Yankees do not have in-house employees running their social media accounts.
For what it’s worth, the official MLB Twitter account did not ackowledge A-Rod’s home run either, though they didn’t acknowledge much on-field action because they were busy promoting Will Ferrell’s various appearances today.
I’m certain this is an oversight, but given all the attention A-Rod has received this spring, it was going to get noticed when the Yankees snubbed him on Twitter.
According to the Yankees on Twitter, A-Rod’s homer didn’t happen Wednesday. (USATSI)
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