A few words about Adam Wainwright, sports trolls, and social media sewage

The Cards pitcher deactivated his Twitter account, a great spot on a fast-decaying platform.

If you’re going to copy a professional baseball player and use that model for future rookies, Adam Wainwright would be a fine choice. Maybe he’s not the absolute best model, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone much better.

Wainwright has it all. A great career, personality, and premium leadership skills. He runs charities and mixes it up with Cardinal Nation, providing fun inspirational messages as well as goofball posts. One of the platforms he’s made the best use of is Twitter, where he shares info from Big League Impact, the charity he spearheads every year, arranging a fantasy football tournament that lengthens its reach.

During the pandemic and short MLB lockout, he shared hilarious videos of him golfing in his hotel room or having a joking moment with a teammate. Wainwright freshened up a platform that most athletes either don’t know how to use, or how to use and not get in trouble. The St. Louis veteran could reach a class on it.

But first, he’ll have to reactivate his account. After a disastrous start in London on Saturday against the forever-rival Chicago Cubs, the starter took a roasting on the social media site, which must have triggered the shutdown. Would you like to have a thousand or so strangers tell you how much your poor performance screwed up their Saturday afternoon, even after you’ve already schooled yourself on what went wrong. Maybe it’s the folks who coughed up a bunch of cash to watch the team play in another country. Maybe it was just a pack of soulless asshats who weren’t cared for by their parents properly.

In this current day and age of social media tough talkers, it’s not a big surprise to see a pack of underdeveloped humans go after a good man. Yes, we know he’s a good man. You’d have to be blind and/or deaf to miss his unique charm. He smiles, cracks jokes about “young bucks” on his staff, and generally makes a high stress job seem cool and a little relatable… at least for a little while.

He’ll be back. I highly doubt Wainwright stays away for long, taking more of a break than exiting all together. But the fact that he had to do this in the first place, following a start he’d like to forget, is displeasing. Hold the statement that says this was the work of Chicago Cubs fans. They toss plenty of hate at any Cardinal, successful or not, so I wouldn’t think yesterday would be a time to pile on. The Cubs have given him trouble over the years.

This was the work of disgruntled sports fans who think every season should go as they’d like and all players will perform like receptive robots. Nope. This game is made or broke by fallible humans; they can screw up just like we can in our job.

I would place a good bet that the majority of these haters were St. Louis casual fans. A few uneasy diehards probably fired it up, but the casuals carried the message because they think well-paid means indestructible. They should be ashamed of themselves.

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Photo Credit: Jeff Curry/USA Today Sports