AP Stylebook tries to police sports writing, fails miserably in embarrassing tweet

Well, it’s time for some nerd-bashing, brought to you by The Liberty Line. The AP Stylebook Twitter account decided to bring the wrath of sports fans (and me) upon them by trying to suck all the fun out of sports writing in one of the most braindead posts the timeline has ever seen.

The dorks over at the AP not only made themselves looks stupid, they were immediately hit with a Community Note showing their own writers using some of those exact terms:

A team losing a game is not a "disaster."
Home runs are homers, not "dingers," "jacks" or "bombs."
A player scored 10 straight points, not 10 "unanswered" points.
If a football team scores two touchdowns and the opponent doesn't come back, say it "never trailed" rather than…

— APStylebook (@APStylebook) October 25, 2024

Say what you will about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, but Community Notes is probably the best feature on the app. It’s made even sweeter that the Associated Press is supposedly the gold standard of journalism.

My big question is who the hell wrote this? I understand most journalists are nerds, I’m a bit of a nerd myself, but this has to be one of the dumbest tweets put out by an allegedly reputable source in recent memory.

Not every loss is a disaster, but as a Philadelphia sports fan, I’ve witnessed a number of disasters, tragedies, and collapses that have directly affected my development as a human being.

Bryce Harper’s home run to seal the 2022 NLCS was anything but your standard home run. Kyle Schwarber’s 488ft shot against Yu Darvish cannot be described as anything other than a bomb.

I understand wanting to avoid hackneyed terms and phrases in journalism, I learned that at the esteemed Klein College of Media and Communication in the Fighting City of Philadelphia. But sports journalism is about so much more than reporting the facts or recapping a game.

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