Astros infielder deletes Twitter account after blasting fan privately
Social media isn’t for everyone. After a couple missteps over the past few months, Houston Astros infielder Alex Bregman decided enough was enough. The 23-year-old deleted his Twitter account Tuesday after a private message he sent blasting a fan was made public.
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The fan in question goes by @AllenH83 on Twitter. He posted the following direct message conversation with Bregman on Monday night. For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, direct messages are meant to be private.
(We’ve posted screenshots of the conversation below so we could blur out one naughty word used by Bregman. The original, unedited tweet appears here.)
Bregman appears to be responding to some tweets in which the fans suggested the Astros should have traded Bregman to the Chicago White Sox for Chris Sale during the offseason. There is one tweet where the fan calls Bregman a bad word that rhymes with “brick,” but Bregman doesn’t mention that here.
Here’s the general play-by-play of the private messages:
Bregman initiates the conversation by telling the fan he has “zero clue about baseball.” The fan defends his position, stating he believes Sale would help the Astros more in 2017, and says the fact that he believed it would take Bregman to get the deal done should be a compliment.
At that point, Bregman gets a little salty. He messages back telling the fan he “shouldn’t give flees [sic] on the [inappropriate word] of society the time of day.” The fan calls Bregman out for sending private messages to someone on Twitter, and Bregman ends the conversation by saying “keep my name out of your mouth.”
To make things even weirder, it doesn’t appear the fan ever tagged Bregman’s account in any of his tweets. Bregman likely searched for his name on Twitter, saw a fan suggesting he should be traded and took it upon himself to respond privately.
That somewhat sets this apart from other player/fan interactions on Twitter. Players will sometimes respond to fans who include their handle in tweets trashing them. While those responses often contain some trash talk, they are generally entertaining and do not cross the line.
Bregman was not involved initially, but decided to seek out the confrontation. Not only that, but the one inappropriate line he used doesn’t come off as playful. We’re not saying Bregman deserves a suspension of anything like that … he just handled the situation poorly.
It’s not the first time Bregman has gotten himself in trouble on Twitter. He called out Texas Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor for a bat-flip during the World Baseball Classic, but later deleted the tweet. A few months later, he sent out a tweet with an abbreviation that stood for “Beat the [Stuffing] Out of the Rangers.” Bregman eventually apologized for that one, though he didn’t delete it at the time.
Tuesday was the last straw, apparently. It’s unclear whether someone in the Astros organization told him to shut down the account, or whether Bregman decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.
Either way, Bregman won’t be tweeting for a while. That’s usually a good thing, but it’s hard to applaud Bregman after being mad online got him into this mess in the first place.
(BLS H/N: WFAA)
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Chris Cwik is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at christophercwik@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Chris_Cwik
