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27 Tweets Thatll Make You Chuckle and Good Lord

Written By vendredi 18 mars 2022 Add Comment Edit

Leading off the fifth inning of the second game of a sleepy summertime doubleheader on August 19, 2020, Reds correct fielder Nick Castellanos prepared for a pitch from Royals reliever Greg Holland, freshly summoned from the pen to preserve a three-0 arrears. Kansas City catcher Meibrys Viloria called for a fastball and fix upward on the outside corner, his open glove hovering at the bottom edge of the strike zone. Castellanos raised his left leg and stepped toward the plate, and Holland delivered. The bullpen got the height right, roughly, just his 4-seamer missed horizontally, tailing in on the right-handed hitter. Through the center-field photographic camera, the pitch looked a little depression and inside, but MLB's Statcast system saw it knee-high, on the within corner. And so did rookie umpire Jose Navas, who raised his right hand and called information technology a strike.

As Castellanos looked back at Navas to lodge a complaint, Flim-flam Sports Ohio's veteran Reds broadcaster Thom Brennaman—son of Cincinnati institution and Ford C. Frick Award–winner Marty—geared up for his own delivery in the circulate berth back at Not bad American Ball Park. About 2 hours earlier, in the 7th inning of the starting time game, the 56-twelvemonth-sometime Brennaman had casually uttered a homophobic slur on a hot mic, not knowing that the broadcast was back from commercial. His comment fabricated the rounds on social media, and past the eye of the second game, the pressure and scrutiny had intensified to the point that Brennaman was forced to sign off. Only before he did, he fabricated a doomed attempt to restore his reputation and rescue his career. "I fabricated a comment earlier tonight that I guess went out over the air that I am deeply ashamed of," he began, seconds later the strike call. "If I accept injure anyone out there, I tin't tell you lot how much I say from the lesser of my eye I'm so very, very sorry."

On the field, oblivious baseball men stuck to the script, and play proceeded. Again Viloria chosen for a fastball on the outside corner. Again Holland's offering went broad of its target. The righty's second consecutive four-seamer, approximately the same speed as the preceding pitch, also sailed within, but this 1 was higher and hittable. Castellanos, a hot hitter who entered the at-bat with a .650 slugging percentage, swings at pitches over the inner part of the plate more than often than the average batter, and after being burned by Navas on strike one, he wasn't well-nigh to have some other. Castellanos missed much also oft on his hacks last season, but when he fabricated contact, he barreled the ball 16 percent of the time, a college charge per unit than 95 percent of other hitters. The event of this swing was a fly ball that would exist one of the sweet 16 percent. Bat hit horsehide hard, and the ball began a 410-pes journey over the left-heart-field fence.

In the booth, Brennaman's adjacent somber sentence had already started. But rather than finish the idea, he reverted without break to the TV patter ingrained by 33 years of calling major league games. Almost unbidden, a dwelling run telephone call came out, surreally spoken with the same sober intonation as the self-castigation. "I pride myself and think of myself equally a homo of faith, equally there'southward a drive into deep left field past Castellanos and that'll be a habitation run," Brennaman said. "And then that'll brand it a iv-0 ballgame." The mid-apology play-by-play, ESPN'due south Pablo Torre says, "was like listening to the band play on equally the Titanic was sinking. Except the band was also somehow the iceberg."

Equally Castellanos circled the bases, Brennaman went back to doing damage control. "I don't know if I'm going to exist putting on this headset again," he said, and so prostrated himself before, first and foremost, "the people who sign my paycheck." Despite professing uncertainty about his professional fate, he had to know and so that he was almost certainly calling his last game for Fox Sports Ohio. Simply earlier he took off his headset, Brennaman left the building with an absurd, Brockmirean blend of meltdown and mundanity, made fifty-fifty more memorable by the irony of the ball touching downwards just to the left of a Planet Fitness billboard emblazoned with the tagline, "sentence-free zone."

"Watching Thom Brennaman break the fourth wall and then suddenly reconstruct that wall, in the same breath, remains one of the funniest things I accept ever seen," Torre says. The moment marked the death of Brennaman'due south Reds broadcasting career, but the nascency of a meme: a copypasta, or block of copied-and-pasted text, that repurposes the apology and accompanying telephone call as both a bait-and-switch joke and a commentary on current events beyond baseball. Brennaman's use of an anti-gay slur was ugly and damaging, but his on-air effort to salve himself, interrupted by an ill-timed—or, peradventure, perfectly timed—dinger, was a serendipitous parting gift that seems destined to long outlast the defrocked broadcaster's big league career.

"It's kind of like this decade's Rickroll," says announcer Jen Mac Ramos, i of the foremost copypasta practitioners. But more so than the timeless practice of siccing '80s pop star Rick Astley on unsuspecting readers, the Castellanos prank expresses a point of view. It's become a common rejoinder used to skewer the sources of all sorts of screwups, scandals, and transparently self-interested public apologies. Dr. Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at Stanford who studies online influence, says, "There's an interesting group cultural phenomenon going on underneath this that I find fascinating. … If you want to telephone call bullshit on someone, this is how you answer."

Although Brennaman'south words were bound for meme immortality, it took multiple missteps to cement their status. In the backwash of the incident, Brennaman became Twitter's main character. Several videos of the hot-mic moment and of Brennaman's amends garnered thousands of retweets apiece, and many account owners condemned his use of the slur. But the broadcaster'due south offense was however fresh, and the meme's massive potential was notwithstanding largely untapped.

Still, in that location were signs of the copypasta to come. Accomplished shitposter Craig Goldstein, the editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, tweeted that he was "because starting a new career where I insert home run calls into famous, somber moments," and hundreds of others replied to the tweet with their best suggestions. Assorted tweets from the first day or ii evidence that some users were experimenting with the possibilities provided by an out-of-context Castellanos phone call. Torre recalls that when he showtime saw the footage, he "immediately started thinking about what it'd be like if history's virtually infamous speeches suddenly had to recognize the laws of play-by-play." He rapidly composed a mashup of Richard Nixon's resignation spoken language and the "drive into deep left field," which became the most prominent night-one case of the proto-copypasta.

Simply after a flurry of Castellanos tweets in the day or two after the dinger, action died down. For more than a month, the would-exist meme was on life support, with no more than than a few tweets per solar day quoting the Castellanos phone call. The "drive into deep left field" looked similar a ii-twenty-four hour period wonder that would be buried under a deluge of competing inanities and 2020 terrors. Then came the turning point that would catapult the copypasta to Twitter stardom.

The graph below shows the daily book of tweets containing the phrase "drive into deep left field by Castellanos" from last July 19 through this past Saturday, based on Twitter's estimated activity every bit provided by Twitter analytics company Vicinitas. The blue line represents original tweets only (including replies), while the red line likewise counts retweets. Of course, this information ready encompasses only a portion of the penetration of the Brennaman meme, excluding alternate wordings, paradigm-only examples, or uses on not-Twitter platforms.

Unsurprisingly, nobody tweeted about a "drive into deep left field by Castellanos" in the calendar month leading upward to August 19, even though he'd hit some during that span. The bleep of August 19 and twenty is easy to encounter, as is the dearth of tweets in the weeks thereafter. That flatline gave manner to a sudden fasten on September 25, a momentous date for the Brennameme. In August, the Reds and Fox Sports Ohio had issued late-night statements after the fateful 4-0 ballgame (which ended 5-0) announcing that Brennaman had been suspended from his duties as an MLB and NFL broadcaster and denouncing his words. Brennaman had elaborated on his amends, this time with his headset off and Castellanos safely exterior of the concoction'south box, in postgame comments to The Athletic and in a Letter to the Editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer the next day. But it wasn't until September 25 that Brennaman revealed that he'd "decided" to "step away" for good (or at to the lowest degree until someone, somewhere, was willing to rehire him).

In response to Brennaman'southward resignation, the Reds tweeted a argument from CEO Bob Castellini in which Castellini elided the reason Brennaman wouldn't be back, thanked him for his work, called him "a fantastic talent and a good man who remains part of the Reds family unit forever," and applauded his unspecified "efforts of reconciliation with the LGBTQ+ community," whom Brennaman hadn't mentioned in his on-air amends. The CEO stopped simply curt of giving Brennaman a medal for meritorious service. "They deserved to have memes tweeted at them all day long for that," says author Marjorie Ingall, cocreator of the apology analysis site SorryWatch. That sentence was soon carried out: Every bit Defector documented, hundreds of users replied to the Reds' account by tweeting Brennaman's apology and Castellanos call either verbatim or with clever variations, as with one user who pretended to be annoyed by the bombardment before segueing mid-sentence into the "bulldoze into deep left field." As the graph reveals and Ramos remembers, "That's when it truly became a meme."

Through that onslaught of about-identical tweets, the format matured. Like Thom following Marty in the Reds broadcast booth, the Brennameme trod a path paved past predecessors over the past xv to 20 years at text-heavy sites such as 4chan, home of copypasta legends like Bel-Airing, in which users started out telling serious-sounding stories and and so detoured into the lyrics from the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. "By the time you lot got there, you're like, 'Damn it,'" says professor Ryan M. Milner, associate chair of the Department of Communication at the Higher of Charleston. Milner, who studies and writes books about memes and internet culture, explains that the kernel of the Castellanos copypasta is endlessly reproducible. "Once you've got that template figured out, which is 'serious thing, blasé play-past-play of something completely unrelated in the middle, dorsum to the serious matter,' then you can apply it everywhere, which is what we're seeing."

Over the next ii months, Brennamemers grew more imaginative and branched out beyond baseball. Timing played a part in the scale of the spread. "When it became a meme was when there was a lot of stuff in politics going on, a lot of statements diminishing COVID-19," Ramos says. "So anybody was just like, 'That's a bad statement just like Thom Brennaman's argument. I'one thousand going to put the copypasta on it.'" Because of the abiding intersections of Castellanos and politics, Ramos says, "Information technology got to the bespeak where someone thought information technology was a Russian hack job or something. People had to say, 'No, information technology's the Castellanos copypasta.'"

On October 1, Richard Staff, a writer for Mets web log Amazin' Avenue, trotted out the Castellanos telephone call in response to the news that President Trump and Melania Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus. "When I saw Trump got COVID, putting the bulldoze into deep left in the middle of his proclamation was somehow my offset thought, because specially with how serious it was, nobody would expect to get Brennaman'd," Staff says via direct message. "Obviously, people liked it, and the Brennaman posts began to snowball into the become-to copypasta for news." Echoing Milner, Staff attributes the template's appeal to its power to subvert expectations, saying, "you really don't encounter it coming until information technology already hits you."

On October 13, a user named Hannah merged the Brennameme with another copypasta to produce the most-shared example of the phenomenon to engagement. Her tweet has been retweeted most iv,000 times and liked nigh twoscore,000 times. "It shocked me when the tweet got and then big, considering I didn't know that many people establish it funny, merely the meme really reaches everyone," she says via DM.

Six days subsequently, Sports Illustrated writer Emma Baccellieri dropped the Brennaman bomb in a tweet inspired by New Yorker author and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin's apology for his "Zoom Dick" disgrace. Baccellieri had doubts about sending her contribution to the Castellanos corpus, because the meme was in no-(Brenna)human being's-land: non new, but not quite established enough to authorize as a classic. Simply the temptation to tweet was likewise strong. "Information technology was honestly the first thing I thought of when I saw the Toobin apology, and it was but so funny to me, I had to do it," she says, also via DM. Thousands of readers were glad she did. "I very much believe information technology's earned a spot as [a archetype meme] and volition live on forever, at least in the vernacular of Weird Baseball Twitter," Baccellieri adds.

The Brennameme has piggybacked on virtually every major news item of the past several months. Rudy Giuliani'due south comments about his Borat appearance. Kim Kardashian's defence of holding her birthday party on a private island. Electoral maps, electoral votes, and coup attempts. The "Bernie Sanders wearing mittens" meme. Robinhood restricting GameStop trades. Meghan and Harry'south Oprah interview. Meyers Leonard using an anti-Semitic slur on a Phone call of Duty Twitch stream. The original home run call improbably appeared during an apology for a homophobic, fireable criminal offense, so what's to stop information technology from being interjected in any other context? "If a drive into deep left past Castellanos tin interrupt that, it can interrupt annihilation," Staff says.

Milner says several factors have helped the Brennameme proliferate. First, the fundamental building cake: It was tied to a moment that got a lot of internet attention, which primed a large group of people to play around with the form. A recognizable broadcaster uttering a taboo give-and-take on the air and then apologizing alive would have made news fifty-fifty if the apology hadn't been derailed, but information technology was, which leads to the second factor: The situation that spawned it was inherently ludicrous. "This is one of those times when it's not really skillful to be multitasking," Ingall says. As Milner observes, Brennaman "got himself in this situation where he has to be making this intense cultural amends, but he however has a game to telephone call. He's trying to exercise them both in the same jiff and messing up both of them in the process." That preposterous sequence, Milner says, "is going to make us express mirth. And in the historic period of the internet, if things make us laugh, then they spread."

Then there's the syntax. The home run telephone call is itself a non sequitur, which enables the Castellanos call to be linked to any preceding judgement merely every bit logically (or illogically) every bit information technology was when Brennaman offset uttered the infamous lines. Just stick in a comma, add an "as in that location'southward a drive," and you lot're good to go. "The 'as' is the killer [give-and-take] at that place," Ingall says. "It lends itself with that 'as' to memeing so well." The "drive into deep left field," Baccellieri observes, is likewise perfectly situated between the "big-picture seriousness" of the "homo of faith" clause and the "melancholy vibe" of the headset judgement. "Information technology would be at to the lowest degree xx percent less funny if the dwelling house run had come between whatever two other sentences in the apology," she says.

At the hazard of overexplaining the joke past citing a highfalutin term from humor theory, the reaction to Brennaman's disjointed apology is an example of "advisable incongruity," or the entertainment that results when reality differs from our understanding of how something is going to go. "We have these ideas about what'due south expected, what's advisable, what'southward professional," Guadagno says. "And then every once in a while, people suspension those scripts."

Brennaman bankrupt the script of a standard, sanitized sports broadcast, offset with his slur and later with his on-camera confessional. Simply he also tripped on the steps to a tedious tradition: the insincere-seeming, pro forma public apology shared in controlled conditions.

Nobody knows exactly what was in Brennaman'southward head as he spoke his concluding words for Trick Sports Ohio, merely his amends failed the sincerity sniff test in any number of ways. The extended delay between the offense and the apology. The irrelevant reference to being a man of organized religion. The "if I have hurt anyone." The initial failure to apologize personally to the people he hurt near. The "That is not who I am. It never has been." As Ingall says, with the wisdom of one who's critiqued countless apologies, "It's plain at least a office of who you are. Then to say, 'Oh, this isn't really me,' when we know it'south him—in that location's actually no amends that'south going to piece of work well for that. And there shouldn't be. We believe in forgiveness, but you have to earn information technology."

Apologies are a staple of online life in the 2020s, a time of shifting norms and diminished privacy. Whenever a Milkshake Duck is discovered or a polished public persona slips, a reckoning comes, followed by a PR-canonical Instagram post or a practiced rehabilitation tour. If Castellanos had taken strike two, mayhap Brennaman could have submerged himself in that bounding main of sorrys and avoided disproportionate attention. "If it was merely the formulaic apology, then there would have been an eye roll and maybe some commentary near that," Milner says. "We would have moved on. Only the incongruity of him calling a play in the middle, information technology but further punctuates how rote this must have been, that he wasn't even heartfelt enough to get through it without turning to this play call." The apology's performative nature was laid bare, all because of a bulldoze into deep left field by Castellanos.

Memes, Milner says, are all virtually reappropriating concepts from one situation and applying them to a second state of affairs. "When yous practise that remix," he says, "y'all're saying Matter B is like Thing A. In this case, Thing A is this insincere, forced apology, evidenced by this cut-in for a play telephone call. Then when you utilise it to Thing B … then you're saying, 'This is too an insincere and forced amends.'" The Brennameme, and so, is a autograph, a means of signaling a cynicism born of beingness fooled before.

"When information technology's articulate you're lying, an amends sucks," Ingall says. Then "it tin be both cathartic and helpful to point out a knee-jerk bad apology or corporate-speak." The Brennaman meme makes us laugh, but information technology also offers an outlet for false-amends fatigue. "The more we all call bullshit on that apology," Ingall says, "I think that'due south good."

Once you get hooked on Castellanosing, information technology'south tough to walk away. Ramos intended to retire after working the Castellanos call into the lyrics of "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music on October 17. They were lured back into action on October 27 by a Fox Sports statement about Justin Turner's positive COVID-19 examination. That was going to exist their last Castellanos tweet, besides, but so the ballot rolled around. As a substitute for doomscrolling while waiting for results, Ramos built a Twitter bot to automate the copypasta. The fruits of their labor, @DriveIntoDeepLF, has upwards of 3,000 followers and automatically quotes Brennaman when anyone tweets at the account. Ramos, who'south no longer contemplating retirement, has occasionally commandeered the business relationship to tweet some pop originals.

Scanning the bot'south mentions makes Ramos aware of what'southward causing copypasta uses. When Meyers Leonard tweeted a much-maligned amends, Ramos says, "Everyone was basically similar, 'This just sounds similar a Brennaman apology.' And I was thinking, 'I guess Brennaman is now the standard of what a bad apology is in sports.'" Days later, an Oklahoma high school basketball announcer said the N-word on a broadcast and, every bit part of an 8-paragraph printing release, blamed the racist remark on spiking blood saccharide. That excuse might have set a new standard for suspect apologies, but information technology was swallowed past the Brennameme.

"I definitely did not wait it to notwithstanding have life in March," Ramos says of the meme. "And I feel like at this point it'southward but going to stick around." Although the Twitter activity has subsided some since late last year, the meme has enjoyed a long tail of attention, buoyed both by a free-flowing stream of poor apologies and by a trickle of news near Brennaman or Castellanos.

In October, MLB pitcher Robert Stock replied to Staff'southward Trump tweet to say, "I'one thousand not sure this format will ever go old." YouTuber Bailey (of Foolish Baseball game fame) responded by Brennameming him. When the Roberto Clemente League in Puerto Rico hired Brennaman in December to do play-by-play, Bailey kept the format merely inverse the language, enlisting a translator to transcribe the Brennameme into Spanish.

In Jan, Twins writer Brandon Warne recreated the Castellanos homer in MLB The Testify and synced information technology upward with the call:

When Castellanos turned 29 on March 4, the Reds bravely ventured into prime number meme territory to tweet birthday wishes. Predictably, most of the responses referenced the right fielder's drive into deep left. In mid-March, a Sporcle quiz well-nigh Brennaman's apology appeared. And last week, San Diego sportscaster Ben Higgins seamlessly slipped a spoken version of the meme into a highlights package as he narrated a Castellanos leap-training homer.

Castellanos has hit xc homers over the by four seasons, which ties him for 37th in the majors. Like well-nigh right-handed hitters, Castellanos lifts nigh of his flies to right field, and he has home run power to all fields.

But wherever he hits his homers into 2021, every new white potato will generate a notification and present another opportunity to tweet.

Despite beingness one of the about-mentioned figures on Baseball game Twitter, Castellanos doesn't have an official account. And if he ever does determine to join, he'll have to ignore his notifications. Last October, Bradford William Davis of the New York Daily News mused that Castellanos "is going to log on i mean solar day, search his name and exist so amused." Whether he's amused, perplexed, annoyed, or indifferent remains a mystery; the Reds declined to relay an interview request for this story, and his agent didn't respond to an enquiry. But mayhap it's better not to know. Castellanos was an unwitting chaos agent in a affair much larger than him. His surname belongs to Twitter now. And if he has to be internet famous, at least it's for hitting a dwelling house run.

Regardless of how Castellanos feels, the meme additional Baseball Twitter'due south spirits during a painful catamenia. "It was so good to see the baseball community come up together to make something good out of a situation like that," Hannah says.

Before Ramos became a 1-person copypasta machine, they considered whether poking fun at the apology could exacerbate the damage done by Brennaman. "As a queer person, I don't want to have away from the seriousness of proverb a homophobic slur on the air," they say. But they came to view the purpose of the copypasta every bit punching up at the person who committed the transgression, not mocking the people he harmed. "I accept generally felt OK about it, because it's pointing out: Don't do this," Ramos says. "Otherwise, y'all will get shamed on the net, and you lot will go an everlasting copypasta meme."

Kelvin Brumm and Ginny Searle, who wrote about Brennaman's use of the slur and baseball's history of homophobia at Baseball Prospectus, say they also see the upside of the meme. "Over the by few decades at that place has been a button by some within historically marginalized groups to repossess some historically pejorative words and phrases," Brumm says. "Though I wouldn't say this is wholly analogous, I capeesh people being able to accept Brennaman'southward ensuing comments and make them into something genuinely funny." Brumm concludes, "In my personal journey as someone who is gay, I've come up to observe that it helps to express joy when you tin at life, and since this joke is but at the expense of his apology … I don't run into anything problematic about it."

Memes similar the Castellanos copypasta can become a community's common language, a means of locating similar-minded people and building bonds in online environments. "The people who understand the backstory and recognize the meme are going to get a dose of pleasance out of the fact that they encounter the meme … they know what it ways, and they know that they're in an exclusive group of people who empathize it," Guadagno says. Nearly memes require less specialized knowledge than the Castellanos copypasta, she says, "yet somehow information technology still caught on and broadened across that group," she says. Not that it's easy to explain with words. "No explanation tin come close to just showing the video," Baccellieri says.

Baseball game has inappreciably been a hotbed of famous memes, thank you to its older demographic, fans' regional relationships to the sport, and MLB's misguided GIF embargoes. The Castellanos copypasta is a rare crossover exception. "I've been on the cyberspace for way too long, and I've seen a lot of memes come up and go, just this is the one matter in Baseball Twitter that I've seen that my friends who are non involved in Baseball Twitter at all send me," Ramos says. Ane friend gave Ramos a physical emblem: a Castellanos Topps card defaced past the Brennameme.

Jen Mac Ramos

Unless his stint in the Clemente League was the beginning of a Brockmire-esque journey dorsum to the big leagues, August 19 was (4-0) ballgame over for Brennaman. Merely the keepers of the Brennameme will keep coming together to make the all-time of a bad (and extraordinarily strange) situation. Whenever an offender says this isn't who they are, fails to specify what they're sorry for, or appends an "if I offended anyone," the words of the exiled Brennaman will be at that place to greet them, as there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos and that'll be a dwelling run. And then that'll make information technology a 4-0 ballgame.

An earlier version of this piece misstated where Brennaman was when he issued his amends.

smithlowee2001.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2021/3/29/22356061/drive-into-deep-left-by-castellanos-home-run-call-meme

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