New York Mets shortstop Wilmer Flores in the dugout following a standing ovation for a his last bat as a Met following news on social media of his trade to the Brewers – only it turns out the trade never happened. (Noah K. Murray-USA TODAY Sports)
To begin with, this is not a post about Cecil the lion, although it very well could be.
Instead, it is about another sort of quest, one that is undoubtedly legal but has still proved elusive for decades: to get the New York Mets another World Series championship. More specifically, it involves the attempt on Wednesday by the Mets to land an all-star quality center fielder, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Carlos Gomez. As Andrew Rudalevige recently reminded readers of this blog, I am a long-standing Mets fan, and I will join everyone else in noting that last night was bizarre, even by the admittedly crazy standards of our beloved franchise.
[Monkey Cage: Andrew Rudalevige conveniently forgets the Mets 1986 World Series triumph in his recent post on Presidential Moneyball.]
However, the point I want to make is that the star/villain of this particular night was not Terry Collins (the Mets’ manager), not Sandy Alderson (the team’s general manager), not super agent Scott Boras, not Mets blogger Michael Baron, and not even the Minnesota dentist, but rather (as Sandy Alderson correctly identified) social media itself. And what this demonstrates is social media’s continuing awesome ability to transform just about anything that gets in its path, regardless of the latest numbers for any particular companies.
To recap, the Mets are, for the first time in years, actually in a pennant chase. The team has made two trades recently that have greatly excited the fan base, but they are still actively looking for a “big bat” to help their — shall we say — less than stellar offensive production this year. Friday is the trade deadline (sort of, but that’s another story) so those of us who are fans are frantically checking every possible source of news to see if the team is about to make another move.
That’s where social media came in. There are lots of play-by-play blows of what happened last night (see for example here, here, here and, especially, here), but here’s the gist of it. During the game, rumors spread on social media that the Mets had a deal in place to acquire Gomez. This information spread among the fans at the game, and when Flores came up to bat in the seventh inning, fans gave him a standing ovation for what appeared to be his last at-bat as a Met. The Mets manager, however, apparently had no knowledge that a trade was supposed to take place, and sent Flores back out on to the field in the eighth inning (the normal protocol is to remove any player about to be traded from a game, primarily so they don’t get hurt and ruin the pending deal). Flores, now convinced because of the ovation that he was indeed about to be traded, was visibly upset and could be seen wiping tears from his face. This was picked up on camera, and images spread across social media like wildfire. On Twitter, the Mets and Collins were getting ripped to pieces for being insensitive and heartless over sending Flores back out there; I can confirm that my son, my mother and I all felt very bad for him as well.
Only, it turned out, there was no trade. Why the trade got canceled is a matter of intense speculation as I write this (and most likely either had to do with medical reports or money), but there never was a trade in place, and as of this posting, Flores (and Zack Wheeler) are still Mets, and Gomez is still a Brewer.
I raise all of this to make a simple point: social media continues to have the ability to redefine all sorts of social interactions that we don’t even really have the ability to anticipate. In the old days, a trade in the works that got leaked to a journalist might have made it into the next day’s paper. In more recent days, it would have gotten onto the next edition of ESPN’s “Sportcenter,” and more recently then that onto the ESPN Web site. But today, that information can — and will — spread in a way that does not have to be top-down: It spreads from peer to peer, and it spreads on mobile devices. That means the speed at which information can travel is unrivaled, and this is something that will be increasingly more and more present in our lives.
While there will certainly be hand-wringing over this state of affairs, it is not going away, regardless of what happens with particular companies and their growth strategies.
So if you are a baseball team leaking information about a trade during a game, you have to now assume that fans hungry for trade news at the stadium will receive that information almost instantaneously.
Similarly, if you are a political candidate giving a speech during a campaign, it will be possible that the people in your audience will be privy to information you did not know before you started your speech. Poll numbers — whether they mean anything or not — will be instantly available to all, and the days of a photo staying with the person who took it are over. If there is a protest happening in your country, everyone is going to find out. Sports, economics and politics: All news is becoming instantaneous, and that will have consequences for how that news is consumed and processed.
[How social media can facilitate protest]
However, there is another important lesson from Wednesday night, which is that the time we have to correct misinformation before it can spread to large numbers of people may be rapidly shrinking. If last night’s Mets scenario played out before the age of mobile social media, the fans at the game might not have learned about the trade until after the game was over (nor might Flores!), and indeed the first thing they might have heard was that a potential trade was in place but it had been cancelled. The ovation would likely never have happened, and we’d be talking about something different today.
In politics, this shortened time frame may be even more consequential, as we have good recent research that shows just how difficult it can be to correct misperceptions about politics once people have heard them.
[Monkey Cage: No, we’re not arguing from the same facts. How can democracies make good decisions if citizens are misinformed?]
In the world of sports, though, most Mets fans woke up ready to believe that Flores was still a Met. At least for now…
It would be something if the #Mets ended up trading Wilmer Flores again, I must say.
— Michael Baron (@michaelgbaron) July 30, 2015