John Smoltz Accidentally Invented Twitter

One of the unexpected joys of parenthood is that dinner-bath-bedtime can become a four-hour affair that drags on in excruciating ways. Like a bad noon game between two air-it-out collegiate offenses. As a result, dear old dad is unable to completely lock into the televised sports. So I was only half-listening to last night's Braves-Dodgers game and didn't catch John Smoltz accidentally coming up with the concept of Twitter, some 14 years after its actual invention.

Thankfully, Awful Announcing was on the case and keen to the existence of social media.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but for my money, Smoltz does a nice job on the broadcasts and his insight into all things pressure-packed pitching is invaluable. Even his detours into the caricature of veteran-man-shaking-his-fist at things are sort of enjoyable, if only for the nostalgia of Tim McCarver and realizing World Series television has always been this way.

It's still funny to hear a person rail against something without fully understanding what they're railing against. Like, yeah man, we already have that. The timestamp is pretty essential to the whole process. The big brains behind Twitter realized that.

The comments open up the possibility that, all this time, Smoltz has believed people could go back and retroactively change their predictions and takes based on results, which would make the publisher/platform even more awful and/or pointless. Important to step back and be thankful for the bad things that could be worse.