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Outside The Confines: Toxic Twitter drives Sean Doolittle offline

After a rough outing, so-called fans tormented the pitcher off of social media.

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Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty Images

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.

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