The Strange Saga of the Dodgers and a Twitter Parody Account

Parody Twitter accounts are difficult to pull off, much less consistently maintain for any length of time. It’s hard enough being funny, but it’s especially challenging to do so while using somebody else’s voice.

But somehow, @DodgerzGM had done it. Since 2009, he had gained a loyal following on Twitter—almost 17,000 followers as of last week—by exquisitely parodying now former Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti, whose role in the organization has been reduced drastically under Andrew Friedman, the team’s new president of baseball operations.

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DodgerzGM’s tweets about Colletti were fairly harmless and light hearted, and struck at the former general manager’s tendency to overpay for relief pitchers. Some of the tweets were voiced in the Colletti character. Others were just stand alone jokes about the Dodgers. Some of them fell flat. Most were funny.

“Sad moment as James Loney cleared out his locker, said goodbye to teammates and grounded into one last double-play,” he tweeted on Aug. 25, 2012.

But something not so funny happened on March 3. On that day, DodgerzGM logged into his account, and while he was able to see his mentions and his previous tweets, he couldn’t post anything new or see his timeline. Shortly afterward, he received an email saying that his account had been suspended.

“I was totally shocked because I had been abiding by the Twitter parody rules,” said DodgerzGM, who wanted to keep his real identity secret.

A Dodgers spokesperson said the team did not ask Twitter to suspend the account. But curiously, the account was suspended shortly after the Dodgers had a social media team meeting in which, according to one source, Colletti spoke about how he had been harassed on Twitter.

An email to Colletti asking for comment earlier this week was not returned. When reached by phone on Thursday, Colletti angrily inquired how I had gotten his cell phone number. I told him that as a reporter I was pretty good at acquiring numbers. He then asked curtly if I had a question. I said yes. He answered that I should go ask it to the person who gave me his number. And then he hung up.

Several emails to Twitter’s media relations department asking why the account was suspended were not returned.

Almost a week passed before DodgerzGM heard back from Twitter. Finally, on Wednesday, he received this clarification: “We’ve received a report that your account, @DodgerzGM, may be in violation of Twitter’s policies on impersonation and/or trademark. Your account has been temporarily suspended.”

The reasoning seemed curious since DodgerzGM had closely followed the Twitter parody account guidelines from the moment his account was first suspended on April 16, 2013 during Twitter’s massive sweep of parody accounts. Those suspensions resulted in a strict set of rules. Most importantly, parody accounts needed to indicate in their bios that they were not the person they were imitating.

In 2013, DodgerzGM made the necessary changes to his bio, and as an added measure, he even changed the name of the account—which was originally @DodgersGM—to further distance himself from the team. His account was reinstated within a week. Since then he’s made no changes to his account name or bio. Therefore, he should not be in violation of the Twitter parody rules.

“If it’s indeed the Dodgers, then I think they’re being overly sensitive,” DodgerzGM said. “The question is why now? I just don’t understand why it’s become an issue. If it was the Dodgers why didn’t they just contact me first? Why can’t they work with me?”

He added: “I’m trying to be patient to whom I need to direct my anger. If it was the organization, then it’s disappointing. Why can’t you laugh at yourself? Why are they picking on me? Do they think I’m a problem?”

DodgerzGM began the account in 2009 as a way to poke fun at the team during the controversial and embarrassing Frank McCourt years.

“It was just real easy to make fun of Ned Colletti,” said DodgerzGM.

The account hit it big when CBS Sports baseball writer Jon Heyman sent out the following tweet on Dec. 11, 2009:

DodgerzGM woke up the next morning and saw his follower count had grown from less than 100 to more than 800, with a lot of the new fans being members of the media. Most everyone who followed the account saw it as a bit of harmless fun. The account never ventured into the type of abuse Curt Schilling recently detailed in his blog.

DodgerzGM said his philosophy was to keep the account PG. He doesn’t curse. He does not get into Colletti’s personal life. Plus, all of DodgerzGM’s criticisms weren’t anything worse than what Colletti was likely to hear on sports radio.

“The account is supposed to be fun,” he said. “I want to make as many people laugh as possible.”

Since the suspension, DodgerzGM has received a ton of support from Dodgers bloggers. He checks occasionally into his Twitter account and sees that people leave him appreciative messages. But because his account is suspended he can’t actually respond to anyone.

“It’s like witnessing your own internet funeral,” he joked.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a serious issue. We’re not talking about a crime or anything like that. But this does strike at the core of whether everything in sports has to be so serious. There is a certain value in having a guy like DodgerzGM poke fun at a team or a team’s moves to remind us that we are in fact talking about baseball, and not the war on terror, for example. And that’s what DodgerzGM enjoyed about the account. He took satisfaction in making people laugh. And now he misses that.

DodgerzGM isn’t all that optimistic that his account will be reactivated, but he’s made preparations for that possibility. He’s already started a new account @Ned2point0—a line in the bio reads: “It has been 0 days since my last suspension,”—which he promises will contain more Ned Colletti fun.

“Maybe when he was ‘promoted’ he probably thought it would be the end of the account,” he says of Colletti. “I made the joke that I wasn’t going to take on the personality of the new GM. He should be flattered.”