Jay Mariotti Backporch

The problem with Twitter? Aside from allowing only 140 characters of data per tweet, leaving us barely enough room to burp and fart, it provides the immediate and unfiltered dissemination of thought by people with no brains. Some of these people happen to be athletes, creating yet another distraction in a sports world with enough alcohol, weed, steroids, groupies and strip joints to go around. Now we have to deal with a daily assault of social-media madness?

---

---

In Chicago, Milton Bradley further endears himself to Cubdom by flipping a ball into the seats with two out, a farcical sign that 100 years without a World Series title soon will be 101. In Cleveland, the poor people still haven't won a championship in any sport since 1964 and might lose LeBron James to New York, assuming the gulls and midges don't eat him first. In Buffalo, they're not yet over the sting of reaching the Super Bowl four times and losing four times, which still trumps chicken wings as the civic identity.

"That's life," Bradley explained. "These people have high expectations. I have high expectations for myself. I never made a mistake like that (losing track of the outs) in my life. Sue me."

"Something needs to be done," the Indians' Ryan Garko said of the birds and bugs that attack Progressive Field. "There's got to be a way to get rid of them. It's kind of embarrassing. We look like a bunch of kids playing on an abandoned field. It's kind of funny, but kind of not funny."

So, how serious was Michael Phelps about quitting the sport that made him famous -- and, um, infamous? Serious as a sheet of paper, a line dividing the page in half and headings with "pros" on one side and "cons" on the other. It was mid-March, not long after a photo surfaced of the American treasure and most decorated Olympian sucking on a bong, and Phelps was tired of celebrity, scandal and a world he no longer trusted beyond chlorine and water.

So now he's threatening to seek an escape hatch, not compete in the 2012 Olympics -- you know, take his Speedo LZR Racer trunks and 14 gold medals and swim home. That would be a regrettable and rather cowardly backstroke by Michael Phelps, who finds himself at an unexpected crossroads in his charmed life and needs to make a mature decision to counter his reckless immaturity.

For a few swigs, anyway, he tried to have a peaceful couple of beers with his U.S. swim teammates. But soon enough, inside this Budweiser-sponsored party tent in Beijing, word circulated that Michael Phelps not only was in the house but was roped off within a VIP area in THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM.