Red Sox Roasted For Twitter Gaffe Celebrating Luxury Tax Reset
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- If there's one thing that fans of a last-place baseball team that traded Mookie Betts do not want to see, it's a tweet from that last-place baseball team spiking the football in celebration of the luxury tax resetting.
That much is generally common knowledge. Unfortunately on Tuesday, the Red Sox misread the room.
The team's official Twitter account sent out a tweet on Tuesday afternoon, celebrating the fact that this unique season did indeed survive to Sept. 1. Thus their competitive balance tax has officially been reset, freeing them to spend some money in the offseason.
The tweet simply showed a picture of a "Reset" button, with the accompanying caption "iykyk" -- as in, "if you know, you know."
The resetting of the competitive balance tax is of course a good thing for the long-term competitive health for the Red Sox, sure. But with the Red Sox wallowing away in last place in what became a lost season in its opening week, fans did not much feel like celebrating this paper transaction.
As such, the reaction on Twitter wasn't quite what that social media team was expecting.
And so, not long after it went live, the tweet disappeared from the universe. The Red Sox offered up a self-demeaning tweet that essentially said, "Whoops."
The tweet read: "You ever miss with a tweet? Same."
You ever miss with a tweet? Same.
— Red Sox (@RedSox) September 1, 2020
The Red Sox' Twitter account has really been in a lose-lose situation for some time. Seemingly every tweet the team has sent out since February has inspired an avalanche of replies from fans who were and remain irate about the Betts trade. Some casual, unofficial observation of the account has seen a major downtick in such replies as the 2020 season has worn on ... but Tuesday's little gaffe opened the floodgates for a whole lot of venting.
While the tweet may have come off as a team celebrating saving money in 2020, getting under the CBT for 2021 is indeed a very big deal for the Red Sox when they enter free agency this winter. Getting to this point has been a clear goal of the team, as evidenced by their mostly inactive offseason (aside from when they traded away a generational player).
And while a franchise-altering free agent may not be available this December, the Red Sox are now free to at least begin their build toward being competitive again.
It's a positive thing in the long term. But it didn't make for the best tweet.
UPDATE: A not-great situation was seemingly made worse when the Twitter account "Sox Notes" -- run as a statistics and information-based account by Red Sox senior manager of media relations and baseball information Justin Long, quote-tweeted Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy's criticism by saying "You're the worst."
Within an hour, the tweet wasn't deleted ... the entire account was deleted.
The Boston Red Sox' Twitter people are ... having a day. We can leave it at that. May it serve as a lesson to all: When in doubt, do not tweet. Never. Tweet.