If you read the centrespread in this edition of the paper and are still not convinced that joining Twitter is worth your time, hopefully this piece will bring you to the light.
Or you’ll take this piece of paper and throw it in your nearest garbage bin and throw a lit match in it.
Either way, if you haven’t figured out, Twitter is the best news feed on the internet today; an accessible conversation with anybody at any time; a vessel to promote your work and expose it to a larger audience; and an impromptu amateur comedy club that tells funnier jokes than Jay Leno has in 19 years hosting The Tonight Show.
But during the St. Louis Cardinals’ dramatic 10-9, 11-inning victory over the Texas Rangers in game six of the World Series, one random tweet popped up that described what Twitter can be in times like these.
When the pendulum swings back and forth between both teams and the lead changes more than the color of leaves between September and November, Patrick Sullivan, who authors the Red Sox blog Over The Monster, said it perfectly:
@PatrickSull: Twitter is the greatest sports bar imaginable. Love you all.
When David Freese, on his last strike, smashed the ball over Nelson Cruz in right field to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth, my timeline immediately had 35 tweets pending – all of which were two or three words long.
It was instantaneous reaction to extending the game and series. The same thing happened when Josh Hamilton restored the Rangers lead in the 10th with a two-run moonshot.
Ditto Lance Berkman’s single into centre to take the game to 11 innings.
And when Freese came back up in the bottom of the 11th and — on his last strike, again — blasted the World Series to game seven there was an electronic avalanche of instant emotion.
Remember when Sidney Crosby scored the Olympic winner and television cameras zoomed to every bar in the country exploding? Recall the mash of images of the bars — including one with Jack Layton — jumping for joy? Take that unbridled happiness and throw it on the internet.
What human beings, not just sports fans, need at the end of the day is a sense of community. We want to know that there are people out there who feel and think like us and want the same thing.
And there we all were, in the same portal, separated by thousands of miles, but united by a laptop on our stomach and a baseball game on TV. The same thing will happen during awards shows, elections and breaking news stories.
While this game was battling the 2005 Champions League Final, Super Bowl XLIII and the 2007 Fiesta Bowl for the title of Best Game of the Last Ten Years, the best seat in the house didn’t reside in Busch Stadium or at a public gathering in Missouri or Texas.
It was in a living room, dorm room, basement or friend’s house and only a computer was needed. And we have the rest of you to thank for doing the same thing and making it such a blast.
Love you all.
