Barry Zito and his Twitter

I’m all about social media, I wouldn’t be writing this if I wasn’t. Quite possibly the biggest thing in social media is the onslaught of Twitter right now. Everyone is using it, including many of our favorite athletes. Barry Zito, Giants pitcher, is taking advantage of this and tweets a lot, if you will. You can find him at http://twitter.com/BarryZito

“3 hrs sleep… should have partied. Traces of adrenaline still in body, gonna go for a walk before the mercury hits triples digits in AZ”

That is Zito’s current status at the time of this blog. Consider the context that tweets are in. It’s unfiltered, straight from the athlete, and that’s why so many fans (followers) are addicted to it. Most people probably wouldn’t bat an eye after reading Zito’s status but I wonder…

Here’s a guy who’s being paid $126 million dollars and quite honestly hasn’t lived up to expectations. I’m not going to go as far to say he’s not earning his money because at least he’s out there pitching. Carl Pavano is someone who didn’t earn his money! Anwways, I digress. The point is that Zito has one decent outing and the first thing fans read in the morning is “3 hours sleep.. should have partied” ?!?

Granted, he doesn’t have to pitch for a few days and if he went out for an all night bender then that’s his business. Why let everyone know about it thought? Zito knows well enough that for every 10 Twitter updates he makes, if one of them is like this then that’s all anyone is really going to pay attention to. It just seems kind of odd.

Zito is definitely more cerebral than your average athlete. He might even be doing this sort of stuff to self-motivate himself, I don’t know. However, at a time where every day there is seemingly a story about an athlete or celebrity doing something dumb on Twitter (Hasheem Thabeet, Charlie Villanueva, etc) it makes me wonder why Zito is so “unplugged” when it comes to his account.

Surely I’m not the only one that is a bit annoyed at this?