At 10:32 p.m. Monday night, Twitter suspended the purveyor of perhaps the largest repository of disgusting, filthy, obscene GIFs on the Internet.

Nearly every Rob Friedman tweet arrives offering four things: a baseball player’s name, a pitch he has thrown, an adjective to describe that pitch and a short video clip to illustrate it. Changeups are “ridiculous,” and fastballs are “absurd,” and sliders are “nasty,” and sometimes they’re “disgusting” and “filthy” and “obscene” and every other sort of visceral descriptor, too. Friedman is best known as @PitchingNinja, and his nearly 50,000 followers relish his ability to curate baseball’s deep cuts – the sort of physics-bending pitches average fans may not notice but ones in which pitching nerds luxuriate.

So when Friedman received an email from Twitter temporarily locking his account because of multiple violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a perfectly reasonable question burbled to the surface: Why would Major League Baseball, which filed the DMCA complaints, seek to get rid of such a well-regarded evangelist for its game?

The answer is complicated. Though before explaining how Friedman and MLB, with the help of an angry army of Barstool Sports fans, ended up in this most 2018 of tiffs, there is some good news for those in need of a @PitchingNinja fix.

He should be back. Soon.

League sources told Yahoo Sports that they expect to “quickly and easily” reach a resolution with Friedman that would allow him to continue posting pitching GIFs. In a letter to the league official who filed the DMCA complaint, Friedman, a lawyer by trade, outlined his argument on how what he does benefits the league.

“I also understand that MLB has every right to protect its product,” he wrote in the email, which he shared with Yahoo Sports. “I’m most certainly not trying to deprive MLB of any value, instead I’m trying to create value by helping pitchers have a sense of community, learn, and appreciate the game. Rather than debate the legal matter, I am more than happy to give MLB all of my gifs for free or work out some other content deal that just allows me to use MLB content, as permitted, for fair use, to help pitchers, coaches, and fans understand the game. I would be happy to donate any content for free and execute a copyright license ensuring that MLB owns any gifs I create.”

It was a Noah Syndergaard pitch that ultimately led to the @PitchingNinja account being suspended. (AP) More

MLB plans to contact Friedman in the coming days, if not sooner, at which point they are likely to agree on what constitutes fair use. The furor over the suspension of Friedman was exacerbated by fear that MLB is continuing a social-media policy long seen as Draconian, particularly when compared to the social-friendly NBA, which adopts the any-publicity-is-good-publicity approach to Twitter and other hubs that share content.

That Friedman spent nearly four years without @PitchingNinja getting dinged is perhaps most surprising of all. MLB’s tack with content rarely wavered: any infringement upon it was a threat to MLB Advanced Media, the league’s Internet arm that started with a paltry investment from teams and grew into a multi-billion-dollar juggernaut. MLB protected its copyrighted content with far greater fervor than the NBA because the league felt as though it had more to protect with MLBAM.

In recent months, according to sources, that intransigence has loosened MLB, recognizing the power of social media, has started to give its content partners more rights in those channels. At the same time, the league is wary that if it rubber stamps accounts such as Friedman’s, it would run the risk of opening a Pandora’s box with other fans – and potentially alienating content partners who still pay large sums for highlights.

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