Brett Lawrie, one of the Blue Jays’ most prolific tweeters, threatened to sign off the social medium forever only to change his mind less than 12 hours later.

The 22-year-old third baseman, who was one of the first people to tweet about the Eaton Centre shooting in June, deleted his Twitter account on Monday night after going 1-for-7 with a single and two walks in a doubleheader against the Orioles in Baltimore.

“This shall be my final tweet of all time! Take care twitter,” read the second-last post on his page.

First he retweeted comments by Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Evan Longoria about a Monday Night Football game, then disabled his account early Tuesday morning.

But by the afternoon it had been reactivated.

In Baltimore on Tuesday, Lawrie didn’t want to talk about what prompted him to first delete then revive his account. “It doesn’t matter anyway, it’s back up now.”

He said he wasn’t directed by anyone with the Blue Jays to shut down his account.

Lawrie, a Canadian who is one of the team’s most popular players for his hard-charging style of play, was among a core of young Jays, including Jose Bautista, Ricky Romero and J.P. Arencibia, who took to Twitter to communicate with one another and the club’s fans.

Their popularity is such that the Blue Jays sell T-shirts with their jersey numbers and Twitter handles on the back.

During the season, the Blue Jays host Tweeting Tuesdays, a promotion that encourages fans to tweet during the game for prizes.

On June 2, following an afternoon game at the Rogers Centre, Lawrie alerted his more than 125,000 followers that shots had been fired at one of Toronto’s biggest tourist destinations.

“Pretty sure someone just let off a round bullets in eaton center mall .. Wow just sprinted out of the mall ... Through traffic ...”

“People sprinting up the stairs right from where we just were ... Wow wow wow.”

Nixon Nirmalendran and Ahmed Hassan died in the shooting and five others were injured, including 13-year-old Connor Stevenson, who was able to recover and threw out the first pitch at a Jays game earlier this month.

Lawrie’s tweets, heavy on slang and loose with spelling and grammar, earlier this year inspired a parody account, @translawrieate which claims to “translate” the Langley, B.C., native’s words for the general public.

Lawrie’s brief disappearance from Twitter was mourned by many of his 157,595 followers. But Jays fan @BlueJaysChirps was the most prescient: “He’ll be back. They always come back….come back. Please! @blawrie13.”

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With files from Brendan Kennedy

[View the story “Brett Lawrie signs off from Twitter” on Storify]

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