The Loop
Atlanta Braves Twitter has a deeply strange fixation with Tiger Woods
Stan Badz
On Thursday night, the Atlanta Braves beat up on the Chicago Cubs 9-4. Around the MLB, the story was the struggling Cubs, who—off to a 1-5 start in what was supposed to be a pivotal year for the Maddon administration—have looked disinterested at best and just not very good at worst. But brewing beneath the Cubs' bare-bones final score communique was something far stranger (and far more fascinating) than the 2016 World Series champs suddenly sucking. There, in the bowels of baseball Twitter, Braves fans had amassed in force, inundating the Cubs' mentions with seemingly endless river of Tiger Woods memes presented sans context, meaning and logic. Let's get weird.
Wait, hang on. There's more.
It goes on like that for miles, turning a simple Braves win into a David Lynch-ian nightmare-scape for the PGA Tour set. If you're wondering just WTF you're looking at, Braves blogger Scott Coleman offered something sort of resembling an explanation on a recent episode of the Talking Chop podcast, where he had this to say:
There’s a photo of Tiger Woods … it’s him smiling, but he looks like he’s about to cry. It’s from years ago, he looks young in it. For whatever reason a few years back, I posted it once. It’s one of those, it’s easier to laugh than to cry. I posted it once and it kind of caught on and it’s been my thing for however many years now. We were talking after the Sunday night loss, tweeting back and forth that we should start changing our profile pictures. And I think the good folks over at Braves Reddit who were the first ones to change it over to the Woods photo.
If you're still completely lost in the, er, woods, join the party. That is a pod person explanation for a trend seemingly started by pod persons. But don't go looking for answers where there aren't any. As even the Braves say, just because you don't get it, doesn't mean you shouldn't dig it.