Move your chemically enlarged fingers away from the mobile keypad, please

October 10th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

Athletes text-messaging. I’ve had enough.

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First, it was Donovan and T.O. Who got the text-message? Was a message sent? Did Donovan’s fat fingers input the wrong number? Did T.O.’s publicist, in a fit of concern for her client’s mental health, delete it? So many questions…

Today, it’s Frank Thomas and Magglio Ordonez. They don’t talk, like relatively normal human beings who want to communicate. They text:

“It’s been great,” Thomas said with a smile of the long odds that he and Ordonez, who were teammates from 1998-2004, would advance to the ALCS on separate teams a year after the Sox won the Series. “We text-[message] each other all the time. We’ve stayed friends along the way. I’m very happy for him because he’s a special player. It’s one of those things. You don’t look back. But we’re both happy we’ve moved on in great situations.”

Let’s get one thing straight - I do not hate text messaging. I use it all the time, to great drunken effect. Sometimes I send my entire phone book lyrics from the new Decemberists album, just to confuse everyone.

But athletes should not be engaging in this sort of thing. Two reasons why:

1. Athletes texting allows for the building of cross-team relationships with relatively no effort, hence undermining the brute competition at the heart of organized sports, and

2. These conversations - in my head, anyway - have to be really, really awkward. To wit:

Frank: Wat u doin?
Mags: Just left BP, bout 2 go get perm
Frank: Lol. Were goin to beat u
Mags: Rotfl. Zito is gay. Ill p0wn him
Frank: Well c. G2G bye.
Mags: Bye fatty.

Shuddering yet? I am.