Baseball reporters are quiet-quitting X: Where are they headed and why?
I joined the social media platform Bluesky in Aug. 2023. For about a year I posted sporadically, mostly using the site to share my Immaculate Grid screenshots. Bluesky, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2019, has always had its limits — most notably, its user base. The incentives to post frequently were weak.
As of today, Bluesky claims 13 million users. Few among them are baseball newsmakers. Even the journalists who do pop in from time to time have rarely broken news there. Many, like me, have thus far been more interested in sharing offbeat musings than actual baseball news.
That's fine, but it's no way to grow a large audience, as many of us did over the past decade on the platform formerly known as Twitter (currently known as X).
A funny thing happened when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States for a second time on Tuesday. My Bluesky follower base more than doubled, from around 300 to more than 600 in the span of a few days. I'm not alone in this observation.
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An actual, functional list of Baseball media accounts appeared this week. Ken Rosenthal, one of MLB's main newsbreakers, created an account (though he's yet to post). So did the Tampa Bay Rays and the San Diego Padres, two actual MLB teams, but not the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees — who just played in the World Series and would probably gain a few thousand followers in an hour if they made the leap (cough, cough).
It's a tipping point, though it's definitely not the first. In the summer of 2023, it appeared Twitter/X was dying amid mass layoffs by new CEO Elon Musk (and the bugs that predictably followed). Much of Baseball Twitter joined other platforms at the time. Even ESPN's Jeff Passan briefly moved his social media newsbreaking operation to Instagram, but he gradually migrated back to Twitter.
This is a different tipping point. It feels less like a practical response to the platform, more of an emotional response to current events.
"i joined here because there was a fellow journo of color who gave me an invite and was here mostly because of JOCs being on here and then stayed because i figured more baseball twitter was gonna eventually make its way over," baseball reporter Jen Ramos Eisen said.
"I’ve had 3 different waves of signing up for other sites since the fall of 2022, in part to reserve my handle everywhere," baseball writer Jacob Pomrenke said. "This is the only one that has actually stuck. It’s a far more pleasant experience (and now more friends are coming over too)."
At its essence, social media has always been about finding your people. Interactions on any platform are inevitably infused with an undercurrent of tribalism. At least on Twitter/X, the "block" and "mute" buttons were always right there when simply logging off would not do.
Anecdotally, it became more difficult to avoid the tribal undercurrent of Twitter/X as politically infused advertisements became more common — a feature of your feed, not a bug. Users were often "recommended" to follow politicians or accounts that post about politics, served up by an algorithm that had little to no regard to the user's own political preferences. If you used social media for sports news, it sucked. The respite from politics, and the strain of political discourse designed to agitate, was gone. User accounts that didn't normally get sucked into politics got sucked into politics.
Today is Opening Day, which means it's a great day to arrest the killers of Breonna Taylor
— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) July 24, 2020
That's what makes the current mass migration so interesting. If Twitter/X users can't avoid politics against their will for perpetuity, Bluesky has a chance. If the agita on Twitter/X was a seasonal blip, and the newsbreakers themselves aren't convinced to migrate, then Twitter/X will remain the primary forum for disseminating and consuming baseball information in real time.
An informal survey suggests the newsbreaking environment in other North American sports faces a similar moment. Sports media doesn't often imitate national politics, but in both cases it will be fascinating to see where we go from here.
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