Christian Yelich gets into Twitter spat with Yu Darvish over sign stealing

As the Houston Astros and baseball’s brewing electronic sign stealing scandal continues to make news -- the latest being audio signatures picking up precise moments of signals coming from the tunnels -- the Brewers being implicated may be at the heart of a testy social media exchange between its star player and one of the team’s biggest rivals.

As Kyle noted earlier in the week, a St. Louis beat reporter mentioned the Brewers as another team he’s heard possibly using some sort of electronic sign stealing system. In the vein of the slew of Twitter videos showing instances of the Astros’ system at work, Chicago Cubs blog Bleacher Nation tweeted out a video of a Christian Yelich at-bat against Yu Darvish this year.

Darvish himself tried to nip any theories in the bud, saying he didn’t think Yelich was stealing signs.

Yelich, though, came back with a response that could be seen as defensive and a little out of the blue.

Other players tried to cut the tension with jokes about their own performance against Darvish, including Josh Donaldson.

The entire thing blew up on Twitter through the course of Friday, further escalating some hard feelings between the two fanbases. On Saturday morning, Darvish tried to have a little fun with the controversy.

Darvish is generally one of the more laid back or less serious players on Twitter (see his playful tweets poking fun at Justin Verlander for his lack of athleticism during the World Series as an example, after Verlander did the same to him earlier in the year, or poking fun at Anthony Rizzo after he won a Gold Glove), so it’s not out of character for him to make a joke out of the entire situation.

Yelich, meanwhile, may be best served by his own advice on Twitter earlier this year -- relax.