Sports

Who won the A’s vs. Smash Mouth Twitter battle?

By BY Jacob C. Palmer • October 30, 2016 12:00 am
Smash Mouth performs at Hard Rock Cafe in Australia in 2013, years before anyone could predict them feuding with the Oakland Athletics on Twitter. (Eva Rinaldi/Flickr)
Smash Mouth performs at Hard Rock Cafe in Australia in 2013, years before anyone could predict them feuding with the Oakland Athletics on Twitter. (Eva Rinaldi/Flickr)

It was a Friday night. All seemed right in the world.

San Francisco Chronicle baseball columnist John Shea took a moment to note the improvement in Coco Crisp’s fate.

This benign observation somehow set off Smash Mouth, the band known for a couple worldwide hits years ago, and more recently, being excitable on Twitter about their Bay Area teams.

Everything seems par for the course so far. Whichever band member tweets from the account typically has strong opinions on sports. But here’s where it gets confusing: The Oakland A’s official account took the salvo a bit too personally and started gunning for the pop-rock band’s jugular.

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(The A’s deleted all of their tweets, but that’s a GIF of Marcus Semien laughing in the dugout. Get it? It’s because Smash Mouth is a joke.)

Alas, the bickering continued.

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The band continued to tweet along the same lines — that the @Athletics sounded childish and that they have great fans and need to do better — because they are typically logged on and live to post.

And the A’s had one final note before calling it a night.

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Then Saturday came and cooler heads prevailed as someone in the Oakland organization realized just what the hell had happened the night before.

The team offered a make-good using a GIF of Stephen Vogt, (who with the right styling could definitely pass for a member of Smash Mouth).

So to answer the question posed in the headline: Who won the Twitter beef between the last-place team in the AL West and a band who made millions of dollars singing the theme song for Shrek?

No one. Everyone lost. We’re all losers now, actually.

(Well, except for Shea — maybe.)

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