Atlanta Braves baseball, making strangers become family

This weekend we lost a very special member of the community we lovingly refer to as “Braves Fam.” While it’s been a sad couple of days for many of us, it’s also been a wonderful reminder at how much our favorite team has brought us together.

Our dear friend Jeremy Livingstone (aka @ @TweeterL44) was unexpectedly taken from us on Saturday morning. Jeremy was a fun-loving good ole boy from Asheville, North Carolina. He was a lifelong Braves fan, but he was a little new to the SABR side of things, when it came to baseball.

Several months ago, Jeremy hopped on Twitter and started following some different members of our wild and crazy Braves Twitter community. I remember him tweeting about how he’d like to learn more about the detailed stats, and I remember seeing lots of folks reply to him with things like, “Make sure to follow ‘so and so’ for this sort of stuff.” In no time, Jeremy was throwing out stats like Jay Jaffe.

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Once myself and Ken Hendrix started our “professional” baseball podcast, Knockahoma Nation, Jeremy was our very first fan. As a “side product” (if you want to call it that) of the podcast, I began making ridiculous little mini-videos on our Twitter and Jeremy thought they were the best thing ever and it made me smile.

Jeremy would often send me direct messages via Twitter on ideas he had for the podcast. Some of them were in text form, and some were in video form. The videos he sent me had me rolling, because it appeared that he was clearly supposed to be at work and not making Twitter videos. Just like so many of us, Jeremy would rather be talking Braves baseball than actually working… you know who you are. Jeremy made me laugh because he played up this country boy card, while he was wicked smart and creative. He seemed like a guy who could see the big picture of things — if that makes any sense.

One of the out-of-the-box/big picture ideas he sent me was an old movie clip. It’s the final scene from an old film called the Executive Suite. Jeremy told me that he had always found inspiration from it and that he thought this particular scene had some baseball analogy in it. Here’s the clip. We’ll probably use it in a podcast at some point.

If you ever interacted with Jeremy on Twitter, you learned that he loved Atlanta Braves baseball and he took pride in not taking himself too seriously. Something I think we all could learn from. And, by God, if anybody ever trolled the podcast, he had our backs.

After the news about Jeremy had settled this weekend, one of our Braves Fam buddies, Warren, Bennett, took it upon himself to start a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for a legacy brick in Jeremy’s honor, to be placed at SunTrust Park. Within one hour, members of the Braves Twitter community came together and reached the goal of $200. Shortly thereafter, the Atlanta Braves reached out to Warren and offered to dedicate the brick themselves.

Seeing so many of my fellow Atlanta Braves fans come together for such a tragedy reminded me that this whole thing is so much more than merely a social media website. I’ve made lifelong friends, myself, from Braves Twitter. Heck, my wife and I got several weddings gifts from #BravesFam members. There are really no words to describe how special this community is. We all loved Jeremy and I know he’d do the exact same thing for us.

Next: Knockahoma Nation Episode 14

Since the Atlanta Braves (the best organization in all of sports) offered to take care of the legacy brick, Warren has kept the GoFundMe account open. Now, any more raised via this campaign will go to help cover funeral costs. Unexpected funeral costs are no cheap thing, and I feel fully confident that we can reach the goal of $1,500 in no time. I’m beyond thankful for Jeremy and for Braves baseball for bringing all of us 80-grade knuckleheads together. I can’t wait to see Jeremy’s brick in person one day.