Let’s help the Giants’ social media team

The Giants’ social media team is responsible for maintaining the social media presence of the team on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It’s a rough job because the team hasn’t gone on any sort of run and for impatient casual fans, 2018 has been mostly frustrating, despite following a completely unwatchable year.

What separates the Giants from most other team’s Twitter accounts in particular is how they don’t use “we” when composing tweets. You’ll see some teams out there saying “We’ve made some roster moves: x, y, z”. The Giants usually go with “Roster moves: blah, blah, blah.” That isn’t to say that the social media folks aren’t a part of the team, but let’s not act like every extension of the brand is connected to a single Team Brain.

The Giants’ social media team, led by Bryan Srabian, has had its work cut out for them over the past two seasons. The Giants were unspeakably awful last season and frustratingly badiocre this season and their tweets, ‘grams, and Facebooks can’t really lean into that if they’re to cultivate a following and follower engagement. People don’t follow along for the negativity, most people turn to baseball as a distraction.

Here’s how the Giants’ Twitter account has handled the latest four-game losing streak:

Rather than clog up the rest of this post with embedded tweets, I’ll summarize the victory tweets as being similarly brief and to the point (and, I’m talking about just those final score images like the ones above): “Ball. GAME!” / “Let’s go! #BeatLA!” / “Fist pump!” “It’s over!”

The Giants stand at 61-64 and, if they’re lucky, they’ll finish the season the same way they’ve played the majority of it: at .500. This means there are 17 losses remaining. They can’t all be “Next stop: (next city)” or “Almost had ‘em!”, so here are some defeat lines the Giants’ Twitter account should consider for the rest of the season, broken into three categories.

Category 1: Missed it by that much!

It stands to reason that the Giants won’t be humiliated in every loss the rest of the way, so here are some of the “Almost had ‘em!” / “ohhhh so close!” variety:

“Gosh darn it!”

“A nail-biter through the first three innings. Alas.”

“Runs were at a premium.”

“Good effort.”

“98% successful”

“Couldn’t take your eyes off of this run.”

“It’s a game of inches”

“One run was almost enough.”

“Closey McGosey”

Category 2: Onomotopoeia

For those frustrating losses or losses where you just can’t think of anything to say but the game and the Giants’ performance gave you some feelings you need to express anyway, broken into two equally important sub-categories:

Sub-category #1: Adam Sandlers

“Slippidy jibbidy!”

“Gobody shobah-woba loo looo!”

“Showwwwww clowwwwwsy! Goooooo!”

“Blabalaba ding dong”

“Posey showsy Melancon nosy”

Sub-category #2: To make while punching a wall

“GUH”

“FUH”

“SHUH”

“NNNYAHHHHH-HAHAAAA”

“HMPH”

“HARUMPH”

Category 3: When it’s a blowout

These are possible, too. After all, the Giants are without Dereck Rodriguez for the foreseeable future and all their other starters plus Jeff Samardzija are likely to get more starts against major league teams.

“Don’t forget to call your folks.”

“Runs were on sale.”

“That’s a stadium record!”

“Tired them out for tomorrow.”

“Runs were scored.”

“The outfielders got their steps in today!”

“That’s a National League record!”

“They used up the bullpen phone’s minutes.”

“What got into the (name of the winning team)?”

“Who says AT&T Park is a tough place to hit?”

“That’s a Major League record!”

In any case, the social media team has their work cut out for them. They’ll need to use every ounce of creativity they have at their disposal to get through the rest of the season. Maybe these suggestions aren’t winners. What do you suggest?