The 2017 Arizona Diamondbacks season in negative Tweets

If I weren’t obliged to have a Twitter account for SnakePit purposes, I’d stay far, far away. It’s the ultimate in social media bubbles, whose structure results in a strong accentuation of the hive-mind mentality, and is a place where the mob and their outrage literally rules. It’s great for breaking baseball news. Otherwise, it’s largely a morass of ill-informed opinions and trolls, and all but completely unsuitable for any meaningful conversation.

Even if (as I certainly tried to) you limited your circle to Diamondbacks fans, this season was an immensely wearing one on social media. You’d perhaps think that, with the team having their best season in six years, and that coming when expectations were close to zero, social media would be brimming with happy, excited fans, delighted by the pleasant surprise of a contending team, and fully behind them,

If so, you don’t know Twitter, do you? Instead, it was a near-perpetual stream of way-too much negativity, which was relentlessly wearing. Now, this certainly wasn’t unique to Twitter. Some of our Gameday Threads were so bad, I suggested in May that there were people who needed simply to enjoy the ride. But the inability and/or reluctance to do so, likely reached its nadir on the Twitter. Here are just a few of the gems I collected over the course of the season, beginning just a couple of weeks in. I can only imagine what it might have been like if the 2017 Diamondbacks had actually sucked...

Premature ejaculation of the year

I hate to be that guy, but you appear to have mis-spelled “third-place MVP” and “fourth in Cy Young voting”. And I’ll give this Tweet an honorable mention.

Torey Lovullo and line-up construction

He was the National League Manager of the Year. He has been involved in the game professionally for more than 30 years. He has access to far more information than any of us. But it’s amazing how many fans still thought they knew better than Lovullo, from the comfort of their armchairs... #DoritosAllRound

But no-one was more doggedly relentless in knowing better, and his hatred of Chris Herrmann, than this man. It was so wearingly monotonous, he ended up being a rare person on Twitter I had to mute.

Patrick Corbin’s ERA the rest of the way = 2.80.

The D-backs “worst line-up of the year” actually won the game 12-2. After which Mr. Zaun muttered that we “can’t be results oriented.” LOL. Fortunately, Torey Lovullo appears to have proved highly “results oriented”. And that’s why we reached the post-season, folks. Oh, a fun fact: the team had a better record when Chris Herrmann starts (33-21) than when he didn’t. [His catcher’s ERA was best on the team...] And it continued all the way to the end of the season.

Pay no attention to the 24-game turnaround under Lovullo’s control! That’s just being “results oriented”! But let’s count those “2017 National League Manager of the Year” awards!

• Torey Lovullo: 1
• @JonathanZaun: 0

All hope gone

More generally, reports of the death of the Diamondbacks’ season were frequent, and appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

Hang on... That name looks familiar. Twitter, search me: “dbacks season over from:isaacfromCT” See also:

Y’know, saying something frequently doesn’t make it true...

Fun fact. The D-backs’ playoff odds didn’t “fall off” even to 75% at any point after June 15.

I’ll just leave this here.

Even little more than a month before we clinched home-field advantage in the wild-card game, the nattering nabobs of negativity were still out in full force, thanks to the Twins series. Dear god, that was a brutal weekend on social media, with people fleeing the Diamondbacks bandwagon.

And, of course, our busiest Chicken Little:

The Diamondbacks ended up sixteen games ahead of the Marlins.

They lost. It lasted. And I hate to be that guy, but you appear to have mis-spelled “Most fun regular season”...