In addition to being one of the most successful broadcasters in sports history, Joe Buck is also one of the most heavily criticized. He has been accused of being a homer for every team in America, called every name in the book and probably told to kill himself or “eat a (blank)” thousands of times.
That’s pretty much why Buck hasn’t tweeted in well over a year.
During a recent appearance on a podcast with Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated, Buck explained that he quit Twitter because he found himself engaging negative people and allowing criticism to affect how he was doing his job.
“I found that I was spending an inordinate amount of time either engaging the people that were giving me crap or kinda sparring with someone who was being funny back or you know retweeting or engaging somebody that was being positive,” he said, as transcribed by Jim Adair of Crossing Broad. “It was really everything. I think Twitter kinda breeds a lot of the negativity and I know when you’ve written articles about me there’s kind of an apology to the Twitter haters that you start with that always catches my attention.”
Not surprisingly, Buck says the last straw came when he was calling a game between the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies — two very reasonable fan bases, right?
“I was in Philadelphia actually, from what I remember, and I had the feed open and I was doing the game – I think it was Boston at Philly – and if you want harsh comments do a Boston/Philly game and have your Twitter feed open,” he explained. “And I started reading the comments and finding myself almost reacting to it, and curtailing what I was saying or an opinion as I was going through the game. And I was like what am I doing? This is a dead-end. This is moronic.
“So I was like, you know what? It felt like when I dropped an Astronomy class in college when I was failing it, I’m just gonna delete this from my phone.”
Believe it or not, public figures have natural human reactions, too. Heck, Buck gets so much Twitter hate that he was once blasted for a game he wasn’t even calling. I don’t blame him for calling it quits.
