Less than a week after a playoff run that made fans out of an entire country, Alex Anthopoulos, the architect of the most successful Toronto Blue Jays team in more than two decades, has left the organization.
Though it’s been widely reported that Anthopoulos was offered and declined a multi-year contract extension, the masses don’t seem to care: Twitter reaction has been swift and ruthless, squarely blaming the team’s ownership for the “bungling”.
#ComeTogether turns to #SobTogether. We will miss you #AA. God Speed. #Rogers you suck. #BlueJays
— Don Salmon (@DonSalmonKeys) October 30, 2015
Some, perhaps unsurprisingly given Rogers’ other businesses, voiced their displeasure by promising to cancel their cable and phone plans with the company and switch to its biggest competitor:
Cancel my cable. … Wait, I’m on Bell. … What the hell, cancel it anyway. #rogers #bluejays #AA — Kevin McGran (@kevin_mcgran) October 29, 2015
Thanks @Rogers for nothing. #AA is the man. #bluejays I shall unsubscribe and join #bell
— Evan Hamilton (@evanchamilton) October 30, 2015
MediaMiser used its media monitoring software to gather and analyze a sample of tweets mentioning AA’s departure. While the majority of those were neutral in how they felt about the loss of the team’s GM (54%) ━ most just retweeting reports of the news ━ the rest were unanimously negative in their view of the situation. Fifty-eight of the 125 (46%) were manifestations of sadness, anger, and/or bewilderment, 22 of them retweets of the following:
Now I finally understand all of Adele’s songs. #BlueJays #AA — Andthopoulos (@_rallycap) October 29, 2015
This can partially attributed to its author having over 1,500 followers, and partially to its appearing in the Toronto edition of Metro.
@_rallycap Your tweet made it in the paper. pic.twitter.com/FrsapZCBsq
— BallHer (@BaseballHer) October 30, 2015
One major takeaway from all this is the fact that, in our sample, not one tweet was explicitly in favour of the divorce.
Of course, there’s a good chance the team won’t disintegrate without Anthopoulos. But regardless of the true reason AA is no longer a part of the Toronto Blue Jays, it seems the Twitterverse has voiced its opinion — and it’s decidedly negative.
