… is that 140 characters isn’t always enough to say what you want. Here’s a case in point.

A common trick question goes as follows: who was the last switch hitter to be the American League MVP? In the National League there have been a couple recently — Jimmy Rollins and Chipper Jones come to mind — but there hasn’t been one in the AL for a long time. The intended answer for the question is Vida Blue, who won the AL MVP in 1971 … but of course, he was a pitcher, and had all of 121 plate appearances that year (this is before the DH). So it’s a trick question, and I’m not a big fan of it. So when Doug Glanville posted the question (retweeted by Joe Posnanski), I wrote:

Oh yeah? Eck [Dennis Eckersley] was a switch-hitter in 1992 too. (Prove me wrong!)

I thought it was clear that I was joking — the joke being that Dennis Eckersley did not bat at all during his 1992 MVP season, being a pitcher in the American League, so who knows if he decided to switch-hit that year? But apparently no one got the joke, including (the very funny) Doug Glanville, who tweeted “I have to look that up!” followed by “According to a couple of bios I looked at…he bats right! :)” A few others chimed in as well, noting that all of Eck’s career at-bats were taken right-handed.

Sigh.

Anyway, glad my tweet got noticed, sad that something I thought was funny was, in fact, not. Learning experience! I’ll stick to straightforward tweets about the Braves and crosswords and promoting this site.