Derek Holland Claims His Twitter Was Hacked And He Didn't Call Anyone A "Fag"

Derek Holland was pulled from the Rangers' game on Sunday after getting knocked around, and retreated to the clubhouse. It hasn't been a great year for Holland, and the Rangers are desperately clinging to both the league's best record and the AL West lead, and since Holland's very active on Twitter, a number of fans expressed their frustrations directly to him. One of those tweets:

"7 runs in 6-2/3. Horrible! But hey at least you've got that really good impression of Harry Caray. You're a waste of space."

It wasn't the only critical tweet, and it wasn't even the meanest, but it was the only one that got a reply.

Naturally this became a thing, complete with separate investigations from MLB and the Rangers. Not only is it against baseball rules to tweet during a game (the message was sent while Holland was in the clubhouse and the game was still going on), but because of the homophobic content. In the wake of the Yunel Escobar incident, MLB's being hyper-vigilant. But eye black is one thing; Twitter offers plausible deniability. And Holland is adamant that he didn't send the tweet, so he must have been hacked.

"I know it wasn't myself," Holland said. "I talked to my family and my fiancée and they all said the same thing — that it wasn't them. I know MLB is taking care of it and helping me out and figuring out who it was."

Holland says that the only other person who has access to his Twitter account is his fiancée, Lauren, and she told him she had nothing to do with it. (It should be noted that Lauren is active on Twitter herself, and hasn't been above arguing with fans about Holland's performance.) Texas GM Jon Daniels is less committal in ruling out suspects, saying only that "nobody has admitted to doing it, so we don't know if it was somebody who had access to the account appropriately or if it was a hacker."

Since there's no way to prove anything, and MLB doesn't want to mess around with discipline on the eve of the playoffs, expect this story to die quietly.