colorado rockies-ryan rolison-barack obama Jun 1, 2018; Denver, CO, USA; General view of a Colorado Rockies batting helmet during the fifth inning against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Coors Field. Mandatory Credit: Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

Attention everyone who will soon become a professional athlete or any other sort of public figure: Download you Twitter history, scroll through your old tweets and please, please, for your own sake, delete any offensive ones. You will thank us later.

On Monday, Colorado Rockies first-round pick Ryan Rolison pick became the latest to learn this lesson the hard way, when a Twitter user uncovered a tweet from Election-Night 2012 in which Rolison suggested someone should shoot then-president Barack Obama.


Rolison, who was 15 years old at the time of that tweet, deleted the post and apologized for it Tuesday on a conference call with Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich. Via Yahoo, here’s what the pitcher had to say:

It was in 2012, and it was a stupid tweet, and it was immature of me. I had no idea what I was talking about. It was immature of me to post something like that. People know that’s not who I am, and the Colorado Rockies know that’s not who I am.

Bridich, meanwhile, did not seem to be holding Rolison’s online indiscretion against him. Again via Yahoo:

It was a long time ago, and he didn’t really know what he was talking about, it was regrettable. If there was some sort of pattern of behavior, then we’d be talking about a whole different sort of topic, but in this world we live in, in this Twitterverse and Twitter world, and all this social media, these sorts of things are going to happen. And especially when it’s fully available to individuals who are not yet adults or thinking like adults, I mean look, not even adults make good decisions on Twitter. I mean, you can go to the highest power in the land, and how controversial and how things can get out of hand so quickly. We know Ryan’s a good person, and we’ve had many conversations. We’ve had our people get to know him. It’s an opportunity to learn a lesson and move on to baseball, and I appreciate Ryan being up front about it. We can just move on, and I look forward to him really being part of our organization.

Rolison joins Donte Divincenzo, Josh Allen and plenty of others in an out of sports in the annals of people whose old tweets have come back to haunt them. Ultimately, Rolison (like Divincenzo and Allen) tweeted something pretty disgusting… and also the exact type of thing a dumb 15-year-old would post for attention. But even if we can’t come down too hard on him for his old tweet, we can criticize him for one cardinal sin: failing to cleanse his social-media feeds.

About Alex Putterman

Alex is a writer and editor for The Comeback and Awful Announcing. He has written for The Atlantic, VICE Sports, MLB.com, SI.com and more. He is a proud alum of Northwestern University and The Daily Northwestern. You can find him on Twitter @AlexPutterman.