Star athletes are consistently being burned by fans digging up their old tweets, and Jon Lester and others are trying to urge them to do the obvious.
DELETE YOUR HISTORY.
On Sunday, both Atlanta Braves pitcher Sean Newcomb and Washington Nationals shortstop Trea Turner were forced to apologize after some offensive tweets they sent years ago resurfaced. While it should go without saying at this point, Lester took to Twitter on Monday to urge young athletes to take five minutes to clean up their social media accounts.
If you’re on Twitter, please spend the 5 minutes it takes to scrub your account of anything you wouldn’t want plastered next to your face on the front page of a newspaper. Better yet, don’t say stupid things in the first place. Too many young guys getting burned. #themoreyouknow
— Jon Lester (@JLester34) July 30, 2018
Listen I’m far from the sharpest tool in the shed and there’s certainly no halo above my head (pardon the rhyme) but I know some of these guys are great dudes who just had lapses in judgement.
— Jon Lester (@JLester34) July 30, 2018
Agencies that sign players should also be making this a top priority. It doesn’t take long to clean up old tweets or delete an account and start from scratch, but once a single person takes a screenshot of said tweets there’s no turning back.
You would think people like Newcomb and Turner would have learned after what happened to a star college basketball player during the NCAA Tournament. And if that wasn’t enough of a warning, the same exact thing happened to a fellow MLB player during the All-Star Game. Perhaps athletes in all major collegiate and professional sports organizations will finally get the message now.
