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The A's smacked down Smash Mouth in one-sided Twitter battle

Mark Townsend
Yahoo Sports Contributor

Just as baseball fans were winding down from the Indians’ thrilling 1-0 win against the Cubs in World Series Game 3, the Twitter accounts of the Oakland A’s and the once prominent band Smash Mouth were just warming up.

It all stemmed from one tweet by John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle, which noted how Coco Crisp had gone from an unhappy employee and forgotten man in Oakland’s plans to a World Series hero who drove in the Indians’ lone run in their Game 3 win.

From there, it snowballed into an avalanche of jabs that ultimately led to the A’s getting defensive and Smash Mouth getting positively smashed.

Check out some of the carnage.

We don’t know which member of the band or which associate of theirs was tweeting late Friday night into Saturday morning. We do know the account tends to be supportive of the San Francisco Giants, so the Bay Area rivalry might serve as the basis for needling the A’s. The band also performed during a Los Angeles Angels postseason rally in 2008.

Smash Mouth singer Steve Harwell, performs with the band during a rally celebrating the Los Angeles Angels' American League West Division Championship baseball title in 2008. (AP)
Smash Mouth singer Steve Harwell performs with the band during a rally celebrating the Los Angeles Angels’ American League West Division Championship baseball title in 2008. (AP)

Regardless of why the battle started, the Smash Mouth side made a big mistake bringing Billy Beane’s name into it. That not only led to Doolittle throwing some Smash Mouth song titles back in their face, it seemed to urge the A’s into taking gloves off and throwing some haymakers.

And then the A’s went into straight demolition mode, hitting a pair of punches that knocked the band back into its prime in the late ’90s.

As the saying goes in 2016: Stuff got real in a hurry. And no, this was not a publicity stunt.

To everyone’s credit, they at least kept it clean. That made it much easier to relay the fight.

Perhaps the A’s could have been a little nicer too, considering a lot of what was said about them wasn’t wrong. Mostly though, it was just bizarre watching a band from ’90s come after the model baseball franchise from the early 2000s on a social media platform in the year 2016.

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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at bigleaguestew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!