Ryan Franklin is no longer a St. Louis Cardinal.
And 2011 will be a season that the right-handed meatball maker will remember for one thing: Twitter.
He’s now shuddered his account, or at least made it hard for an Internet troll like myself to find, but it really was a story of social media sadness.
Opened over the winter, @Franky31 was actually quite refreshing. Many nights Franklin spent hours chatting with random fans and answering all sorts of queries about the team, himself and really anything. He was a good sport and took to the Twitter with vengeance. Things however, soon took a turn for the worse when Franklin inadvertently took a picture of Pujols in his underwear and Tweeted it out for everyone to see: LINK HERE
Pujols claimed he wasn’t pissed. But if you had to bet your life, I think you’d bet he was PISSED. Franklin ramped down the Twitter usage as spring training wore on. And he outright abandoned it when the first few weeks of the regular season emulated German scat porn embodied as pitching.
Franklin never got it going in 2011 and ostensibly took the first 3 months of the season and forced the Cards to play with a 24 man roster. To his credit, Franklin was pretty stand-up about how bad he was. But the Cardinals refusal to abandon the struggling hurler was equal parts stubborn/stupid/loyal.
Now he’s gone after 3.5 seasons, 84 saves and one chin puff that was really, really weird.
An All-Star in 2009 and a serviceable closer for an average team in 2010, Franklin will not go down in the annals of Cardinals history as an extraordinarily memorable character. After all he didn’t win a World Series like Scott Spiezio and his colored flavor saver… but he was a very serviceable dude for 3 years on the St. Louis Cardinals. If he wants to teach a kids clinic or come back and sign autographs at the Winter Warm-Up, he’s welcome back.
The Cardinals made the only play they could on Wednesday and let Franklin find his way somewhere other than the STL bullpen.
Good luck Franky. Come back to Twitter soon. We promise we’ll be nice.
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