Twitter-triggered story an injustice to Kris Bryant

Before the Chicago Cubs returned home to play Miami this weekend, Kris Bryant was given the day off on Thursday. This sometimes happens to regular players on “getaway” day after a long stretch of games.

Dexter Fowler, Chicago’s human GPS device — he tracks down the coordinates of almost every fly ball that is hit toward center field — also was given the day off.

The bloggers and beat reporters hardly mentioned Fowler. Others referred to Bryant’s day off as “routine.” No Ferris Bueller stuff this time.

That wasn’t the case after the megawatt prospect from Las Vegas left a game against the Dodgers last week with an illness. The Cubs said it was “flu-like symptoms.”

End of story, right? Well, maybe before replay challenges, laptop computers, smartphones and free Wi-Fi at Starbucks. And Sloane Peterson and her white leather jacket with the fringes.

Because this is the social media age, somebody anonymously speculated on Twitter that perhaps “flu-like symptoms” was a euphemism for Bryant being hung over. This was probably because somebody’s old man (or grandpa) might once have told them about Mickey Mantle hitting a home run by swinging at the middle of three pitched balls he saw when he was hung over.

And that afterward, the Yankees may have said The Mick was suffering from flu-like symptoms.

Or maybe it was just because people who speculate anonymously on Twitter, who aren’t famous or don’t have talent, like to bring down others who do. Even when there’s no proof.

Anyway, when the Cubs got to St. Louis, reporters and bloggers gathered around Bryant to chat, because unlike a lot of ballplayers today, he always has time for reporters and bloggers.

One brought up the Twitter post. Everybody chuckled, because Bryant is known as a nondrinker unless you count Gatorade. His high school coach at Bonanza, Derek Stafford, once said of Bryant that he was the kid most likely to appear in one of those ABC after-school specials.

Bryant told the media gaggle it was more likely he would be traded to the Mets than he would take himself out of a ballgame for being hung over.

But then one of the reporters or bloggers wrote up the conversation in a between-the-lines way that might have led the reader to draw other conclusions.

Cubs manager Joe Maddon said something about this sort of thing coming with the territory. As if the pressures on a young, highly touted player to perform in a temptation-laden city such as Chicago isn’t difficult enough.

The story about Bryant and the made-up hangover lasted only one or two news cycles, as days are now called, because it wasn’t long before Bryce Harper failed to run out a routine fly ball, or the National Enquirer reported that Tiger Woods had been catting around with another golfer’s wife, or that somebody made a great catch of a foul ball as he either A) held onto his baby or B) spilled a $11 beer all over the head of the guy sitting in front.

And besides, Bryant gave people something else to tweet about Saturday when he hit a two-run homer in the first inning against the Marlins, then followed with a grand slam an inning later.

But on Friday when I spoke to Mike Bryant, Kris’ dad, about the Twitter fiasco, he still was pretty hacked.

It was irresponsible, he said, for somebody in the media to take a Twitter post that somebody had put up and then ambush his son with that story.

“It allows anybody to say anything they want (without repercussion),” Mike Bryant said.

We agreed that if reporters and bloggers would refrain from rehashing speculative Twitter posts, they would by and large go away, in the manner that people who run onto the field at ballgames by and large went away after the cameras stopped showing them. Except for Morganna, the Kissing Bandit.

I spoke to Duke Sims, the old Indians catcher, about this. He said today’s ballplayers are going to do what ballplayers in his era did, except now reporters and bloggers write it all down.

And that some ballplayers are going to get accused of things they didn’t do, because that gets clicks on TMZ.

When Sims played, reporters traveled with the team. The ballplayers and the writers often drank and chased women together, because they basically made the same salary, and that was one way to pass the time. What a ballplayer did in his spare time was his business. The writers respected that.

There were no bloggers.

Sims said the ballplayers of his generation probably were worse than today’s ballplayers when it came to spare-time business, but that cellphone cameras, like bloggers, didn’t exist. How true.

After the Cubs played the Mets on Thursday, somebody snapped a photo of Anthony Rizzo, Chicago’s star first baseman, riding the subway with average Joes (and Tonys). This one actually made Rizzo look good: Not only was he riding the subway, he was reading a book.

If Kris Bryant was out late the night before the game with the Dodgers, where was the cellphone picture?

Bryant is more famous in Chicago than a Maxwell Street polish sausage with all the trimmings. It could be Fake Nose and Glasses Night at the ballpark, and even people in the Bob Uecker seats would recognize him.

Somebody is always snapping his picture and putting it on Facebook and Instagram. Bryant is great with kids, signs hundreds of autographs, runs hard on routine fly balls. My mom, who is 77, thinks Bryant is “cute.” She never said Ron Santo was cute.

Last year I heard from a guy who had written to Bryant, asking if one of his bats advertised on the Internet was authentic and worth a certain amount of money.

Bryant just sent him one of his.

Anonymous vitriol spreaders on Twitter and these reporters and bloggers should be celebrating Kris Bryant, instead of wanting to see him fail or trying to make him look bad. They should leave that job to those pitchers who won’t throw him anything decent to hit.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.