They woke up on Tuesday with a record of 9-28, absolute worst in the majors.
#Barves
They played Pittsburgh with a new manager on Tuesday night and fell behind 7-0 in the first inning.
#Barveser
After they'd fired their old manager via an accidentally emailed plane ticket home.
#Barvesest
When the Atlanta Braves fired their beleagured manager, Fredi Gonzalez, on Tuesday, it was supposed to breathe new life into the onetime powerhouse franchise that's now seen as bumbling on and off the field.
Instead, it sent use of one particular hashtag soaring on Twitter:
#Barves.
Just about two hour after AJC Braves beat writer Dave O'Brien officially broke the news of Gonzalez's firing at 8:13 a.m., it was officially a thing on Twitter:
"Barves" is nothing new in the lexicon of Braves fans. A deliberate misspelling of the name on the Atlanta uniform, it's become something of an Internet meme in recent years — social media shorthand for shared bemusement and exasperation with a team that won 14 straight division titles between 1991 and 2005, but has seemed to shoot itself in the foot ever since.
There even were "Barves" t-shirts for sale briefly back in 2012, before Major League Baseball and the Braves sent the folks behind it a cease and desist letter. Meanwhile, the word lived on, mostly on Twitter, as a reliable inside joke aimed at the front office for trading away so many good players, at ownership for moving to a new stadium in Cobb next season and — especially — at Gonzalez for his decisionmaking and managing style.
Indeed, the anti-Fredi #Barves barbs didn't stop immediately with news of his firing Tuesday:
But as the day wore on, there was a lot more blame — and even more #Barves than usual — to go around:
Indeed. By the bottom of the first inning, it was 7-0 Pittsburgh:
It was also a verb now:
But it was news of the way Gonzalez found out he was being fired that really sent the #Barves tweeting into unprecedented overdrive — and new forms of usage:
By day's end, firing Gonzalez hadn't really changed anything on the field — the Barves, er, the Braves lost 12-9, dropping their record to 9-29.
But it had added a phrase to the lexicon:
Peak #Barves.
We can only hope.
