Your mother smells of elderberries

By G.F. | SEATTLE

JORDAN ROUALDES recalls looking up in the stands and seeing life-size images of himself and his girlfriend. Mr Roualdes, who played played baseball for a midwest college until last year, followed by a season in the professional minor leagues, was hardly surprised by the attempt to distract him from his pitching. He was more taken aback by the fact that the photos came from Facebook.

During summers, players from various colleges play on the road together. Mr Roualdes became friends with players at other schools, and made and accepted friend requests on Facebook. In the week before games, though, he would receive a spate of friend requests from opposing players and fans, and carefully sort through those to avoid giving anything away. Still, he thinks he must have been a little too sloppy with privacy settings, allowing friends of his new-found friends from other teams to rummage through his personal photos.

Social networks have become a rich mine of information for the opposing team's fans to dig through for tidbits that can be called out during games. Mr Roualdes's college even warned its athlete recruits to maintain careful online privacy to avoid providing such ammunition. "The more private information you have about a person or player, the more it's going to get through to them," he says.

Baseball has a rich tradition of carefully constructed heckles. Unlike the enforced quiet of tennis and golf, and the unintelligible roar in football and basketball stadiums, the baseball pitch is often quiet enough and, especially in college and minor-league fields, intimate enough to let verbal, as well as pictorial, taunts reach the ears and eyes of players. Opposing fans sometimes sit near the on-deck circle, where batters warm up before their turn at bat, and start their work. Some just pull out a piece of paper and start reading a player's Facebook profile, Mr Roualdes recounts. If a player starts to wonder where the information came from and why it is being read out, the heckler has already won the psychological battle, he says. And it can turn nasty. Mr Roualdes did not particularly mind being teased as a middle child, say, (he is one of five) but a fellow player's sister broke down in tears over taunts directed at her.

For now, taunts at minor-league ballparks remain less well informed than those occupied by assiduous students, with more drunken insults hurled than specific digs. But that may change as the degrees of separation between Facebook's users dwindle. The Minor League University site, a blog that provides insight to players in small regional teams, notes in an entry on heckling:

Thanks to online media guides, rosters, and, of course, Facebook, fans can customise their insults to fit each player. Interests, girlfriends, family members—nothing is spared.

Mr Roualdes left the field in 2010, graduated from college, and is now looking for a job. He notes that while he is unlikely to be heckled in a job interview, he does expect to be peppered with questions derived from his online footprint. For that, at least, he is now well prepared.