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Ozzie’s caught tweeting in the dugout

White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen is in doghouse again though I’m not sure for the right reasons. He’s been suspended for two games following his altercation with umpire Todd Tichenor at Yankee Stadium Wednesday night. MLB states that Guillen is in violation of its “social media policy and other regulations regarding the use of electronic equipment during the course of a game.”

Indeed, after arguing balls and strikes with Tichenor, Guillen went back to the dugout and showed him up the best way he knew how. By using Twitter. Kicking dust at the ump is so old school.

Two tweets came through Guillen’s account… the first simply said, “This one going to cost me a lot money this is patetic” The next a little more to the point, said, “Today a tough guy show up a yankee stadium”.

As of now, his twitter account has been silent since then.

I’m usually pretty tolerant of Guillen’s antics. He makes the game more colorful and gives the organization a respectable amount of uncomfortableness that I like. But MLB has it right. Guillen has a job to do in the dugout and it’s not to be using his smartphone to twitter about the game whether to badmouth the umps or whatever.

By the way, Cubs manager Mike Quade has made it clear that HE won’t be caught using Twitter mostly because he can’t pronounce it:

“I will never get in trouble tweeting, twittering, tweetering — I can’t even say it — because I will never do it. I don’t have the time, energy or know-how, and I’m real happy about that.”

Give him time, he might come around.

And Ozzie, arguing balls and strikes, really??

Beginner’s Guide to Following Chicago Baseball on Twitter

If you use Twitter, I assume you are on for on two reasons. To glean information and perhaps to give your own analysis/info on what you know.

If you are a Chicago Cubs or Chicago White Sox fan and on you are Twitter, there are some must-follow feeds to get the most out of the social networking tool. This is a general guide that will help you get started.

Let’s start with the basics.

The Teams

Here are the official twitter accounts for the two major league teams. Follow these if you want the latest news from the Cubs and Sox. Keep in mind that anything from here will most likely be links you will see on mlb.com or press releases. Certainly nothing too juicy.

Chicago Cubs @cubs

White Sox @whitesox

Search Hashtags

Since you all can can read the articles on mlb.com on your own, perhaps of more interest to Chicago baseball fans is search hashtags. This will allow you to follow all tweets from baseball fans having to do with say, the Cubs. Without going into a whole tutorial on Twitter (you can find a good one on hashtags here), suffice to say that any tweet with the “#” sign before the search term before it will be included in the search query and folks will see it when they follow that query.

So the ones that we’re interested in are:

Chicago Cubs #cubs

Chicago White Sox #whitesox

Keep in mind that Twitter programs (like Tweetdeck, Tweetie or Twitterific) take advantage of hashtags much better than the web version of Twitter.

MLB on Twitter

Let me throw out the general Major League Baseball Twitter links out there while I’m on the topic.

MLB on Twitter @mlb.

To follow the Major League Baseball hashtag, it’s #mlb

Other Chicago Baseball people to follow

Cubs fans will want to follow MLB Cubs beat writer Carrie Muskat (@carriemuskat). Similarly, Scott Merkin (@scottmerkin) who covers the Sox for mlb.com is must for White Sox fans.

For the Cubs fans, here a few more.

Iowa Cubs @Iowa Cubs

Official Cubs Vine Line @vinelinetwitter (not too active yet)

Len Kasper and Bob Brenly’s Official Twitter @lenandbob

For the White Sox:

Charlotte Knights @KnightsBaseball

Sun Times Sox blog @CST_sox

I was thinking of throwing up some baseball blog twitter links for both teams but so there are so many I wouldn’t be doing justice to some good ones out there. Just know that most all of them out there have a twitter presence and it’s easy to follow them. Not only is it an easy way to get notified when they update their website but more importantly, you get some good insights from the bloggers in 140 characters or less.

Also, there aren’t too many active Chicago players on Twitter right now (no, the Carlos Zambrano you see is a fake). Former White Sox OF/1B Nick Swisher (@NickSwisher) has an account is quite active (and interesting). Fantasy Baseball Dugout blog has a list of current MLB players on Twitter. Keep in mind not all players with accounts are active or even post themselves.

I’ll throw one more in here for kicks just because it’s been in the news lately. Ozzie Guillen is on the Twitter thing now. And so far, he been having fun with it. So has the Twitter community because his Tweets have been quite nonsensical at times. I’ve said it before… I’m not a Sox fan but I kind of like Ozzie Guillen because I think he makes MLB a little uncomfortable. This Twitter venture on his part is just one more example. You can find Ozzie on Twitter @ozzieguillen.

I hope this help those of you baseball fans who are just starting to use Twitter. If you have other relevant Chicago baseball people to follow on Twitter, please let me know.

Tale of Two (Baseball) Twitterers

Lately, I’ve switched to Twitter as one of my main feed of baseball news. Most sports news sources have a Twitter feed and Twitter while chaotic, is more convenient than Google Reader.

Anyway, here are two people of interest I’ve found on Twitter that readers here might also find useful, relevant or fun. I wouldn’t put these two under the category of hard news but they do make the day more interesting.

@michael_schlact

How many of you have heard of minor leaguer Michael Schlact? Yeah, me either till today.

But apparently, 1,089 other people have heard of him. That’s how many people are following Schlact on Twitter. Schlact has utilized the medium of Twitter to connect with his fans and quite frankly, to make new ones.

Schlact is a pitcher in the Texas organization (he ended up at the AA level last year). He’s a devout Christian and obviously familiar with new technology. Some athletes create online personas on Twitter or Facebook only to see them die on the vine or have others ghost-write for them. Schlact, however, is a pro at not just using social networking tools like Twitter but knowing how to interact with fans.

Schlact has been answering all kinds of questions from fans (he prefers creamy peanut butter and his baseball pitch-back was his favorite childhood toy). But he also asks questions of his Twitter fans too.

No doubt, it takes more than popularity and fan recognition to make it to the bigs. He’ll have to learn to pitch a mean curve ball too (if you’re interested here a decent scouting report from a year and half ago). But I have to like the way this kid is getting to know his fans because if and when he makes it to the majors, he’ll have a hell of a following.

@si_vault

I’m a sucker for old sports photos, especially baseball photos. And Andy Gray seems to be the go-to guy for some really good ones. According to Gray, he runs the Sports Illustrated Vault. Andy’s mission on Twitter is to provide us with links to “old photos of athletes”.

I’m enjoying them as he posts them. There are some wonderful ones like this one of Mike Schmidt wearing some weird kind of wig.

So follow Andy if you want more of that.

And yeah, if you want, you can follow me @BaseballZealot.

Twitter’s not for ‘Prime Rib’ Lou

On the heels of the news that Ozzie Guillen is giving Twitter a try, Cubs skipper Lou Piniella is weighing in on his take on the micro-blogging tool.

Seems like Lou probably won’t be using it anytime soon. When it comes down to it, Lou’s a pretty old-school, meat and potatoes kind of guy.

”No, no, no, no, no,” he said. ”First of all, I don’t know how to Twitter, and second of all I’m not going to learn how to Twitter.

”I’m really not a Facebook or Twitter guy. I’m a prime rib and baked potato.”

Errr. Lou must have been pretty hungry at the time.

Ozzie Guillen gone all Tweetin’ on us

Ozzie Guillen is tweeting.

At least that’s the rumor. You never know with celeb-types if these things are real but it’s been picked up by the mainstream media so it HAS to be legit, RIGHT? <—— <sarcasm>

But seriously, this one appears to be the real thing. As to the content of Guillen’s tweets, nothing too majorly earth-shattering. Things like:

Yessss nice day let’s go to work

and

I feel nice and relax today I don’t know why yeeessssssss carlos quentin and rios in camp b ready people

Guillen on twitter is appropriately, all the buzz on twitter right now. If you think of it, Twitter is just the thing for the outspoken Guillen. How MLB will moderate him will be the big internal issue, I’m sure.

Apparently, Kenny Williams is already unhappy with Guillen’s idea of tweetin’.

If you twitter, you can find Guillen tweeting @ozzieguillen.

Brent Mayne getting the facts wrong and getting all the attention

If you hadn’t heard, one-time catcher and current blogger Brent Mayne has had quite a day on the Internet. Everyone’s a-Twitter about the catcher who was pretty much unknown outside hardcore baseball circles.

The story goes like this (now pay attention because the details are important in this story. Baseball fans won’t let you get away with anything). Mayne went out on a limb and admitted that when JT Snow came up for his very first at-bat in the majors, Mayne told him what pitch was coming. Mayne tells us that after he told Snow that a “fastball outside” was on its way, he smoked a double to left.

What controversial thing to say. And good for him for coming clean, right?

Except it didn’t happen.

Mayne should know better (and probably does) than to get one by baseball fans. It didn’t take long before someone posted the boxscore of JT Snow’s first game. How strange that Snow was 0 for 5 in his appearance.

So either:

A) Mayne is clueless about the all-encompassing expansiveness of the Internet. He’s a former ballplayer just talking about the old days and didn’t realize that he JUST MIGHT be fact-checked.

B) Just the opposite… Mayne is shrewd businessman who knows how to drive traffic to his website which in turn will increase sales of his books and other products.

I’ll just give him the benefit of the doubt and say it’s (A) though I’m jealous of all his web traffic for a stupid story that wasn’t true.

To be fair, Mayne has issued a correction/retraction. The article rambles and is all over the place (you’ve read my stuff so you know what I’m talking about). JT Snow was “playing for the Yanks” and he knows for sure it was “towards the end of the season”. He’s even “sure it was JT”.

He’s not so sure about the double thing, though. Might have been an out or something.

I’m ready to let this thing die. I’ve given it more room on this blog than it probably deserves.

Andre Dawson: In or out?

The Chicago Tribune has announced who their seven major sports writers support for the 2010 baseball Hall of Fame ballot. Aggregately, the seven of them would vote in Roberto Alomar and Andre Dawson.

Dawson has always been on the bubble when it came to the Hall. It didn’t help that he had 438 homeruns short of the (what used to be) the magical number to get in, (whether or not you like that litmus test. I don’t) It also doesn’t help that he played for a team that doesn’t exist anymore and another that for the most part was mediocre (Dawson did his part winning the MVP for the last place 1987 Cubs).

Hopefully, this is his year. If you really want to see him in the Hall, you can help push for his election by joining Cubcast’s Twitter blitz aptly named #Dawson4theHall. More info on their website.

Dawson may have an uphill battle, though. Seems to me that the BBWAA is becoming more selective in recent years, with the possible exception of Bruce Sutter (sorry Sutter fans, I liked him too).

But mostly in the ‘00s, they’ve only voted in the creme de la creme, something the Veterans Committee should perhaps look into. In 2009, it was Rice (long time comin’) and Henderson (shoo-in). In 2008, Gossage. In 2007, two obvious choices in Ripken and Gwynn. Others in this decade: Boggs, Sandberg, Eckersley, G. Carter, Eddie Murray, Ozzie Smith. Kirby Puckett.

Ok, there WAS Mazeroski. *snicker*

As far as his legacy is concerned, Dawson can be thankful he was picked up by the Chicago Cubs in 1987 after playing eleven years with the now defunct Montreal Expos . He was 32 years old and played only six years for Chicago but recently the Cub faithful have really taken up his cause for the Hall with a vengeance. See the above Twitter effort as an example.

Point is, as much as I like Dawson (and I do, being a Cub fan. Besides being a good player, he had a pretty cool WGN theme song based around him), it might be a tough row to hoe.

PS I couldn’t think of it at the time but the song was “Andre’s Army”.