No Tweeting On The Greens, Please

Anybody watch Ken Burn’s follow-up to his seminal documentary, “Baseball,” last evening on PBS?

Entitled “The Tenth Inning,” I just happened to be channel surfing my 157 channels with nothing else on so I tuned in.

And is often the case with Ken Burns’ work, I couldn’t tune out — I watched the first of two parts glued to my seat, particularly with the deep background on folks like Barry Bonds, and especially the section covering the Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa home-run-a-thon in the summer of 1998, when both broke Roger Maris’ single season home run record of 61, set in the 1961 season and a record that stood for 37 years.

I also wallowed in the recap of the powerful late 1990s Yankees (I’m one of the 10 percent who love the Yanks).

But Burns didn’t pull any punches in this follow-up, highlighting the huge damage that Major League Baseball’s ostrich play on performance-enhancing drugs has done to the game, not to mention the 1994 player’s strike, from which the league is arguably still recovering (and the damage from which the Sosa/McGwire home-run-a-thon Burns argues also helped assuage).

Rest assured, I’ll be tuning into part two this evening.

But of course, what I’m really psyching myself up for is this weekend’s Ryder Cup.

After Jim Furyk’s nail-biting twofer win of The Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup last weekend, I’m totally stoked for the final golfing denouement of 2010.

However, I won’t anytime soon be a fan of the Twitter ban that Ryder Cup captains Colin Montgomerie and Corey Pavin have imposed on their respective Europe and U.S. player rosters.

For golf fans, and the golfers themselves, the Ryder Cup (which is only played every two years) is one of the most enthralling and nerve-wracking golf tournaments in the world.

Considering the sport of golf has seen its amateur ranks dwindling in membership by over ten percent the past few years, it seems to me the sport and its players should become more transparent, not less.

Though I don’t necessarily want to burden any of the players with Tweets live from the course, it could serve the game well to allow the players to Tweet after hours as the drama of the players’ intense days wind down.

Instead, a code of golfing Omerta silence has been imposed, and we fans will just have to guess what the players are thinking as they sweat out their three days in Newcastle.

That’s okay.  I’m sure the worldwide golf audience will be sure to help fill the Twittering void.