December 30th, 2013 at 6:00 am 
by Ron Cervenka Last week a photograph was posted on Twitter by ‘Just Baseball Photos’ (@Baseball_Photos) showing an enormous crowd gathered in front of the Washington Post headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue near our nation’s capital watching the historic 1912 World Series on an electro-mechanical scoreboard resembling a large pinball game. I smiled when I first saw the photograph because every one of the thousand (plus) men in the photograph is wearing a hat (except for one guy in the bottom left corner) – not baseball caps but actual hats like my grandfather used to wear.
The more that I looked at the photograph, the more intrigued I was by it because it was, in every sense, social media at its very best. It was a huge crowd (the social part) viewing an electronic version of a World Series game (the media part) being played several hundred miles away.
The 1912 version of ‘social media’ (Photo courtesy of Shorpy – View full size)
Obviously there was no television in 1912 and the first radio broadcast of a major league baseball game would not occur for another nine years – August 5, 1921 to be exact. As such, the only way to catch the game in real time was to either be at the game itself or to follow it just as the gentlemen in the photograph did – which undoubtedly involved some delay. Updates from the game would have come via telephone (through manual switchboard exchanges) or via telegraph. The information would then have to be manually updated onto the electro-mechanical scoreboard by a Washington Post employee.
Fast forward 101 years.
As most Dodger fans know by now, the Dodgers were recently named the top social media team in Major League Baseball, leading in total growth throughout the 2013 season on Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram and third on Twitter. Under the watchful eye of Josh Tucker, the Dodgers’ Coordinator of Social Media and the modern day version of that Washington Post employee responsible for updating the electro-mechanical scoreboard, and the equally efficient Dodgers PR staff, hardly anything Dodger-related (in-season and off-season) goes by without it being posted somewhere on today’s ever-growing social media networks.
Dodgers Social Media Coordinator Josh Tucker has done an outstanding job keeping Dodger fans up to date with the very latest Dodgers news – often within minutes of it happening.
(Photo credit – Jon SooHoo)
According to MLB.com, the Dodgers were tops in all of baseball in engagement per fan on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr. Instagram was the club’s most engaged platform with 30,849,622 likes, 373,072 comments and 309,314 new followers of the @Dodgers account. On Twitter, the club saw 1,588,291 retweets from January to October – a 274 percent increase over the 2012 season.
Why the big increase in social media activity?
As I see it there are several main reasons:
- The increasing number of sports news outlets, journalists, analysts, talk show hosts, beat writers and bloggers frequently posting the very latest breaking MLB news.
- The increasing number of MLB players actively involved with social media, thus allowing fans to actually interact with them – none more so than our very own Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp and Joc Pederson (to name only a few).
- The ability to access social media from a wide variety of devices and from virtually anywhere in the world. It’s like those old American Express commercials – folks simply “Don’t leave home without it.”
- And, of course, it’s fun!
Without question, the MLB At Bat app is the single best way to keep up with the latest scores and other MLB news. It also happens to be Apple’s top-grossing sports app for the past five years. (Photo courtesy of Windows Phone Central)
The bottom line is that even though social media has been around in one form or another for over a century, it has never been as convenient and comprehensive as it is today – with the very latest breaking news only seconds away.
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The upside of social media is that its at our finger tips when ever we need it. IMO the down side is we now think we can’t live without it. Some might think that because one person posts it or it’s on the Internet it must be true. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s now a challenge of who can post it first. The problem though seems to be he who posts first usually has done the least amount of qualification.
Yes social media is exciting and it is here to stay ! And I for one will invest in learning all about it. I just hope that we as a society learn to understand and use it responsibility.
Nice article Ron very thought provoking.
It all boils down to who you choose to follow and who you trust on social media.
I try desperately to use my bullshit detector when deciding who to follow. I tend to stick with the more credible, reliable and established sources, many of whom work for major sports outlets; but even some of them jump the gun from time to time in order to be first. (I laugh at the daily Masahiro Tanaka nonsense).
I am in no way a journalist but I have done a lot of homework in the field and rule number one in journalism is that “Getting it right trumps getting it first every time” – something that I strive to do in every article that I write.
Don’t sell yourself short Ron. Today’s top bloggers are more informed and passionate about their work than many of the beat writers covering teams today. I’m more trustng of you as a source for Dodger news than some of the writers who don’t do their due dilligence when it comes to research when reporting the news. That’s the way I see it and you won’t convince me otherwise.
Thanks Evan. As I’ve told you no less that a dozen times, I have always tried to emulate your writing style and that you, Eric Stephen and Tony Jackson were my inspiration for starting the ThinkBlueLA blog site – so you are 33% to blame. 😯
It is amazing how the social media has advanced itself, especially over the passed 20 years or so and I’ll leave the rest of you to add to this wonderful artilce, but almost off the subject, the part about men wearing hats. As far as I can remember my father almost always wore a hat, especially when going to a particular function.
I have no idea, at least I don’t recollect when this fashion ended but I remember also thinking that I’d be wearing a hat often when I grew up but somehow hats just went out of still or something, buy the time I grew older there were very few man wearing them.
Like everything in life, social media brings us both good and bad elements. Ron, you cite the recently published information that the Dodgers have the most “connected” fan base in sports. While that the announcement is great PR for the Dodgers, when people go to the game these days they are very disconnected, hardly watching the game and staring down at their phone. I am not anti-technology. I have the latest tech just like everybody else but sometimes it is just good to turn off the phone and connect to the game.
I agree, Robb. The point is that today’s social media allows those unable to attend the games or unable to watch them on TV to follow them in real time – not to mention following other games of interest, such as no-hitters or perfect games in progress. It also allows die-hard fans to keep up to speed with the latest breaking news during the off-season, which is invaluable to those of us who write about such things.
I totally get it. I have been an mlb.tv subscriber since it first came out. I get to watch all Dodger games. I have to be active on twitter, facebook, instagram among other social media avenues for our business and I don’t blame the Dodgers for putting it all in on social media. Obviously they have been successful and the speed of information on social media is great but baseball is also sport that doesn’t always need the same gimmicks that other sports do. I am certain thatt I just an old fogey on this …
You are a young fogey – the rest of us are old fogeys.