Now I really admire Mo’Ne Davis.
She pitched for Philadelphia in last summer’s Little League World Series with such talent and poise — first girl even to throw a shutout at that event — that she made the cover of Sports Illustrated. She seemed like a charming kid with impressive focus.
Even though her team fell short, it wasn’t a surprise when the Disney Channel earlier this month announced plans to make a movie about her called “Throw like Mo’.”
And, sadly, it wasn’t a surprise when some doofus — Joey Casselberry, by name — tried to knock her down a few pegs on Twitter by posting “Disney is making a movie about Mo’Ne Davis? What a joke. That slut got rocked by Nevada.”
It was a stupid thing to write. Vile, even. Outrage followed, and Casselberry was kicked off the Bloomsburg University baseball team, where he played first base.
Casselberry apologized, posting, “I couldn’t be more sorry…I please ask you to forgive me and truly understand that I am in no way shape or form a sexist and I am huge fan of Mo’Ne.”
His joke — I believe it was a joke — was the kind of over-the-top, absurdly offensive thing that good friends might say in private to shock and amuse each another. And one of the predictable, ever-recurrent perils of Twitter is that it causes users to forget that they’re not in private communicating only with good friends, but declaiming on what can become a massively public stage.
The concurrent peril is that readers tend to respond to ill-advised tweets as though they are well-considered pronouncements intended for the family coat of arms, not impulsive utterances that seemed witty at the time. Extreme umbrage inevitably results, and careers, reputations and relationships are left in tatters.
So how did Mo’Ne Davis respond? She emailed Bloomsburg and asked that Casselberry be reinstated. “It hurt on my part,” she wrote. “But I know he’s hurt even more. … Why not give him a second chance?”
She told ESPN, “He didn’t mean it in that type of way. … Everyone makes mistakes.”
Her grace, her empathy, her magnanimity, is even greater than her fastball.
Don’t tell kids to “Throw Like Mo’,” Tell them to “Grow Like Mo’.”
