Twitter is an amazing piece of technology: facilitating communication, circumventing government control of the media, and frequently bringing people closer together. More importantly, though, it’s also the perfect vector for ostensibly professional organizations to let their hair down and get really, really dumb, as happened late last night, when the official Twitter account for the Oakland A’s baseball team got into a bitter, multi-hour feud with the always feisty official Twitter account for Smash Mouth.
The battle started out when Smash Mouth—which has its origins in the Bay Area—lobbed some criticism of the A’s at baseball writer John Shea. Someone in the team’s social media office apparently saw the tweet, responding with “Insulted by Smash Mouth? #Pfft” (Sadly, the team’s account has deleted all of the tweets, so we’re going off of text captured by Consequence Of Sound.) The two accounts then went at it for the next several hours, trading quips back and forth.
For its part, Smash Mouth kept things relatively professional, criticizing the A’s for their off-season acquisitions and general thriftiness. But somebody at the Oakland Athletics really doesn’t like the Shrek movies, apparently, because the A’s account fired back with a number of surprisingly bitter burns: “Up late desperately tweeting for relevancy? Hey now, that’s not very All-Star of you,” reads one. “Guess you’ve got it all figured out. Except how to make a hit since 1999,” says another. They even took aim at the band’s fans (or lack thereof): “And you have no fans. They all graduated college 18 years ago and grew up. Do the same.”
The A’s tweets have all been deleted, replaced with a conciliatory message and an offer for the band to throw out the first pitch at a game. For its own part, Smash Mouth just seemed amused by the whole thing: