Our Instagram Account Is BACK! …Kinda. Follow @korkedbats2

May 6, 2021. The day the music died.

It’s been 120 days since our Instagram account was taken from us. Deactivated by the mean people at Instagram by request of that douche bag, fat Mr. Clean looking Dana White and his UFC minions.

Now we have to start over from scratch. Every piece of content. Every single follower. All gone. When I tell you it sucks, I’m barely scratching the surface. I can’t tell you the amount of pain that courses through my body when I think back to how hard A.D. and I worked to get that account to where it was.

If you’re a follower of Korked Bats for a while now, you know the basic story. But here are the details.

I was walking the streets of downtown Chicago, along Randolph, right across the street from Millennium Park and the Bean (you gotta see the Bean!). I was actually filming this video of my move to Chicago:

It was also the day we were announcing the launch of my radio show with US99 in Chicago. What could’ve been a huge day for us growth-wise, turned out to be the exact opposite.

On my walk to The Bean, A.D. texted me to let me know our account had been deactivated. I thought nothing of it at first. Our account has received notices from Instagram before. A few times IG would flag copy-written content in which we remove immediately because we’re not about that life. And then there was that one time Serbian tennis fans reported our account over a Novak Djokavic joke. Unfortunately, however, this notice was different. This notice said our account was deactivated indefinitely.

Why?

Because we posted a clip from a UFC fight. And instead of asking us to remove it, UFC ordered for our account to be deactivated. It was one of the biggest gut punches in my professional life. I’ve been let go from multiple radio jobs and yet, this was tougher than that. Probably because we had built it from the ground up. And now it was just gone. Just completely devastating.

We obviously went right to work to not only turn the entire saga into content but to also legitimately work to get the account back. We reached out to everyone we knew. We had a bunch of strangers, people with friends of Korked Bats followers, and even some people who heard me weekly on the radio in Nashville reach out to us saying they either worked at Facebook or knew someone who did. They would all get our information and go to work. But unfortunately, none of them were successful. Obviously.

This went on for the entire summer. As August rolled around, A.D. and I knew we couldn’t enter a new football season without an Instagram account. So we decided to bite the bullet and just start over from scratch. With a brand new account. A sequel to what we already built. Hopefully this is more of an Empire Strikes Back than a Big Momma’s House 2. We’re confident it will be. We learned a lot in the first go around, and we’re going to come out of the gate firing with this account.

Will we ever get our original account back? I hope so. I’m still holding out hope that someone at Facebook has the ability to reverse their decision. If only we could land a conversation with one of those people to talk this entire situation out.

So, if you don’t mind, please follow @korkedbats2. And in return, we’ll deliver some fun, informative, and entertaining content.

P.S. if you’re looking for UFC content, you shouldn’t follow.

P.P.S. We’ve requested to follow Randy Johnson from the new account 5 times already and he’s declined us every time.