(This story originally ran in the September 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine).
Stories come from different places. Sometimes I’ll be watching a game and see something happen, and it will make me want to examine it further. Sometimes I’ll talk to a player in the clubhouse and find him incredibly interesting, making me want to have more and more conversations with him. Sometimes you just write what you’re assigned.
With this Didi Gregorius feature, though, my idea wasn’t for a story; it was for a photo shoot. I desperately wanted to organize a photo shoot of Didi engaging with various types of emoji.
Some background: after every Yankees win since the beginning of 2017, Gregorius has tweeted out a recap of the game rife with emoji, with different marks for each player. The tweets are whimsical and fun, but they drove reporters into a frenzy to try to figure out what each one meant, and Didi refused to say.
So I went on Amazon and bought a ton of different emoji paraphernalia — balloons, pillows, beach balls, etc — and put together a story about the whole phenomenon. In the process, I spoke with linguists who tried to explain to me how different brains might respond in different ways to the emoji; might it make sense that Gregorius, who famously speaks a handful of different languages, might have an easy way with the emoji keyboard?
Either way, I loved writing about the Yankees’ Rosetta Stone, and I hope you’ll enjoy the feature.
https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/didi-gregorius-is-a-fan-favorite-in-new-york/c-253188212