Wallace Matthews, Jeff Pearlman and the Internet

The other day I had kind of an interesting thing happen. Like many of you, I follow people and things on Twitter purely for the aggravation of reading what they say. For instance, I follow post secret. And Anthony Bourdain. I also follow Wallace Matthews. His incompetency has been well chronicled by the the gold standard of incompetency chroniclers and, therefore, won't be rehashed here.

All I will say is this: Wally has spent much of his time tweeting from Yankees spring training about Derek Jeter and his many ground balls—outs or otherwise.  He's obviously trying to make hay out of the whole "Jeter's got a new batting approach, will he rebound" storyline. Groundbreaking.

So, I sent a tweet to old Wally, making (what I thought was) a fairly clever play on words, while alluding to the fact that he's a dummy reporter.  What followed was....interesting.

He responded to me with such an embarrassingly typo riddled response that you would think "first time, long time" Joe from Queens had hijacked his account.

I antagonized him a bit for writing such an incredibly poor response and then, I think, he blocked me.


Then,  I saw he continued to stew, venting to others, even going so far as to suggest that physical violence was required. Wally can handle his biz-nas, though JenJeter2211.

Wallace had handled the punk on his own, alright. He strutted around like a peacock after blocking me. Which is fine, I don't know Wallace Matthews other than to say I think his sports writing is hacky. But, I wonder how his handling of punks jibes with ESPN's social media policies.

This incident reminded me, for some reason, of Jeff Pearlman's weirdo stalking/tracking down of a couple internet hecklers. What if I tracked down old Wally's phone number and called him at home? And asked him, "Hey, dickhead, does it make you feel strong to threaten bodily harm to your critics? Are you afraid your skin will evaporate in the heat because it is so thin? Do you think it's smart to threaten people via your professional Twitter account? Did you put as much, less or more effort into that tweet than any of your columns?"

Would that be an appropriate response? Probably not, right? I mean, if that happened he would probably call the police and at least lodge a complaint, if not try to get some kind of restraining order or something.

So why is it different? Why can Jeff Pearlman act like a psycho and not me? Is it because I am anonymous and he isn't? That doesn't seem to make any sense. Presumably Jeff Pearlman has relinquished a bit of his personal life in seeking employment as a somewhat public figure under his real name. he gets paid to have an opinion and should be mature enough (or well compensated enough) to realize he's going to rub some people the wrong way. 

Despite his relinquishment, no one stalked Pearlman. His online hater did not seek him out. It was just the opposite. Pearlman got pissed off at the guy and, thanks to his professional resources, he was able to track him down and call him at home.

He should have let it go, but, he didn't. Instead, Jeff did this all under the guise of "journalism" i.e. "Is Anonymity Good For the Internet" or something.  That is the only reason his actions were acceptable: Because it was for a story. That's why I can't personally confront Wallace Matthews: It's not my job to turn bullshit into a message.

The lesson in all of this is not that anonymity is dangerous. Anonymity is a threat concocted by those unwilling to admit they are out of touch (or worse, bad at their job) and unable to adjust to the changing landscape of media.  I am not the problem Wally and Jeff. It's you guys. I just finally have a platform to let you know. Work on improving your own shit, rather than blaming it on some unseen, lurking menace.