DownSwinging.com

It’s a little ironic that I am writing this article on a day when Twitter was hacked into and shut down for a couple hours this morning. Besides from the social media giant’s slight hiccup this morning, there is no question that Twitter has revolutionized communication, and maybe somewhat unexpectedly, revolutionized sports communication. We follow athletes and they tell us how practice went or what they want to eat for breakfast. Maybe not that interesting to some, but for those who idolize these men and women, this is an amazing insight into some superstar’s lives.

Until I started this site, I was a Twitter critic. I thought that it was simply one aspect of Facebook (status), which some find to be Facebook’s most annoying feature. This is somewhat true, were I to follow a bunch of random people on Twitter I would undoubtedly be bored out of my mind. But instead I decided to follow only a few sports fans, some bloggers, some athletes, and mostly sports reporters. And boy did this pay off.

On the morning of the trade deadline I checked headlines on the usual sites, scanned over my Google reader and wrote an article that morning without any idea of the sort of exhilaration I would be facing in mere hours. Sure I was excited for the trades to go down, but I didn’t quite realize exactly how close to the action I was going to be.

All of a sudden, as I refreshed my twitter, different reporters were talking about possible players the Red Sox would exchange for Victor Martinez. Two minutes later reports were coming in confirming names. Two minutes after that and new names were coming in. MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo, SI.com’s Jon Heyman, Jeff Blair (a Canadian columnist), MLB.com’s Ian Browne, Bob Nightengale and the New York Post’s Joel Sherman were all in this circle of news, hearing a rumor and posting it immediately. And I was a part of it, it was almost as if I was in the war-room with these guys, spitting sunflower seeds and talking potential deals. Because of a tip off one of these guys got, I was able to post that the Twins had pulled off the deal for Orlando Cabrera several minutes before MLBTradeRumors was able to.

I really felt like I was right there on the front lines, I was literally watching these rumors unfold before my eyes. And I wasn’t just standing-by either. I was writing an up-to-the-minute feed of what was going on in our forum (which got a substantial number of views, so clearly some people were relying on my feed for their news) all the while, updating articles, checking sites and refreshing twitter. It was clicking and typing mania. And of course, I was updating my own Twitter, so I could keep my legions informed. And when I heard that the Twins were in the Heath Bell chase, I wrote this…and then this 17 minutes later. And what happened then? People were re-Tweeting my Tweets essentially citing me as their source for the news. Because I was right there with the rest of the reporters, updating news just seconds after they did.

And when, around 4:20 p.m., after it seemed impossible for any new deal to break, Jon Heyman tweeted the Peavy deal, I had the immediate reaction as all of the other reporters, ‘is this a joke?’. But I quickly found out it wasn’t. And my heart was racing. If it was a couple hours later and I was reading it on ESPN it might not have been that exciting. But it wasn’t like that. It was exciting because I was finding out before people at ESPN. And considering I was just sitting in the Bowdoin College library…that’s pretty neat.