A crazy-busy last few days filled with cooking, baking, eating, whining like a baby about indigestion, working crazy hours at my awesome part-time seasonal retail job (including the 5 a.m. Black Friday shift) and soaking my feet in equally awesome bubble baths – not to mention preparing for the upcoming Winter Meetings – has made this girl a little backed-up when it comes to going into more detail about my “25 Tweets in 25 Days” backstories (and also a little backed up on the tweets themselves).

I was going to start posting them last night when the internet went down.

Seriously. If you don’t believe me, ask my husband (who noticed a few minutes later and came running upstairs shouting “the Internet is down! The Internet is down!” when I’d already shut down my laptop, crawled into bed and started catching up on old Tivo’d shows)

Anyway … here is Day 12’s back story. Days 13-14 coming soon, as well as picking up a little late on my Days 15-16 tweets. Maybe even by tonight!

The goal is still to have the last tweet run the day I leave for the Winter Meetings. I love good timing.

DAY 12: Contrary to what some people may believe, no, most baseball players are NOT jerks.

When people find out what I do for a living, especially people who are fans but don’t work in the game (and sadly, sometimes people who DO work in the game), I frequently get asked if most baseball players are real jerks.

Um, no. They’re actually not.

I won’t go into morbid detail about this because needless to say, the odds alone would ensure that after 25 years as a professional writer who has dealt with not just players at every level – major leaguers, minor leaguers, independent leaguers, field staff, managers, front offices, old-timers, all the way down to college, high school and rec league dreamers (and their parents), — I’m gonna have faced my fair share of … well … horses’ asses. They’re in the society at every level and they’re in baseball.

But that said? If I were to take the time to put together my David Letterman-esque list of Top 10 Guys (and Gals) I’d Rather Bite On Tin Foil Than Ever Have To Talk To Again From My Sportswriting Career, the results might surprise you!

For one thing, I don’t think I could fill even half the list with players.

And no, I won’t list those who WOULD make the list here … other than to say that only one of them is even currently arguably a “big star” in the game.

The rest are a motley assortment of bitter old guy fans (one sent a poorly-spelled letter to my boss that he wouldn’t read our paper again until I was busy emptying the garbage and other things a woman SHOULD be doing), bitter young fans who don’t know why they don’t have my job which they could do infinitely better, “old school” front office types here or there who are realizing the game is changing and feeling that folks like me are part of the reason why (there have been blessedly few of them since my early days of employment) , and just garden-variety asses who would have been asses if they worked in baseball, as doctors, as lawyers, as dot.com geniuses, whatever.

I’ve also found that those who hammer over and over about their complaints and their “woe is me, people are so mean and unfair” (and Twitter has made this more prevalent than ever) tend to attract more active response from the jerks.

In other words – grow a pair (literally or figuratively) and hit ignore, or these days, unfriend or unfollow and/or block.

It’s not you. It’s them. Unless, of course, you want it to be about you.

It’s just luck of the draw and I try not to take it too seriously.

And maybe … just maybe … that attitude is why my tweet for Day 12 is what it is.