Outside The Confines: Toxic Twitter drives Sean Doolittle offline

As of right now, if you attempt to pull up Sean Doolittle’s Twitter profile, the blank page informs you “this profile does not exist.”

Sean Doolittle, the Nationals reliever, has been an outspoken activist for everything from equal rights, women’s issues, literacy, and even the promotion of small businesses as he supported local bookstores while on the road. Doolittle was also vocal about the problems associated with restarting baseball, as he famously said, “Sports are like the reward of a functioning society.”

Doolittle is an example of someone who has used their fame and personal platform for good, and after one bad outing for the Nationals, his so-called fans turned on him with such vitriol that the pitcher deleted his entire account — or at least disabled it from public view.

And it’s hard to blame him, because as his wife Eireann Dolan pointed out in a tweet of her own, no one takes those failures harder than Sean himself.

It’s a strange time to be an athlete right now, as players deal with the overwhelming concerns of their own health and the health of their teammates, face the challenges of having opponent teams suddenly yanked from the schedule, and all this while trying to win games and give fans something to be happy about.

For those same fans to turn around and attack a player with such intense anger, petulance, and entitlement that he is forced to go offline, when he has only ever used his own platform for good, is appalling.

Now onto the news.

• Spencer Howard made his debut for the Phillies this weekend, and Matt Winkelman and Darius Austin look at the rising prospect. (Baseball Prospectus subscription required.)
• Speaking of starting pitchers, Jay Jaffe takes a look at the reduction in workload for starters this season. (Side note, FanGraphs is getting VERY close to their 20,000 subscriber goal, so if you haven’t yet gotten a membership, do it now!)
• A picture is worth 1,000 words, so here are several thousand words’ worth of pictures from this week in baseball, compiled by Alec Lewis. (The Athletic subscription required.)
• ESPN takes a look at how all these postponed games are impacting the shortened schedule.
• Former Angels employee Eric Kay has been arrested and charged for providing pitcher Tyler Skaggs with the drugs that ultimately killed him, reports Michael McKnight.
• Robert Arthur would like everyone to know the ball definitely isn’t juiced this year. (Baseball Prospectus subscription required.)
• These Padres look pretty fun.

• Some of Joba Chamberlain’s baseball memorabilia was auctioned off this weekend, reports Peter Salter.
• Jayson Stark would like you to embrace the weirdness with his newest edition of useless information. (The Athletic subscription required.)
• The three teams currently leading in the National League are sort of a surprise to all of those who tried to predict the season, says Matt Martell.
• The new COVID-19 makeup schedule isn’t doing the Phillies any favors, writes Craig Edwards.
• Andy McCullough would like to know if the new, stricter safety protocols are going to help anything if they can’t be enforced. (The Athletic subscription required.)
• Alex Gordon would like you to know he’s still got it.

And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster. Make it so.