Padres Change Twitter Handle to ‘@Madres’, Kid Steals ‘@Padres’
This happened last year, but I thought it would be a good throwback for Mother's Day:
The San Diego Padres baseball club changed its Twitter handle to @Madres, in honor of Mother's Day, and some smart young man quickly changed his Twitter handle to @Padres.
Of course, Padre is Spanish for "Father" or "Priest" (during the games I've read the lips of some of those players and managers: priests, they are not) and Madre is Spanish for "Mother", so it was a nice tip of the hat to baseball-loving moms all over the world. But no good deed goes unpunished, right Mom?
According to some of the comments in the above Reddit thread, it appears that the team worked with Twitter to make the change to @Madres happen, but someone, somewhere, forgot to put a "hold" on the handle @Padres until Mother's Day was over.
Since Twitter is a private company, at the end of the day they just gave the Padres their handle back, and switched the kid's handle back to the original.
The Padres did end up giving the kid some tickets or some such.
I would assume that someone in the marketing department at the Padres' home office got an ear full that day.