Sports fans have gotten a bad name in recent years with troves of fighting videos and crude taunts captured in social media clips — but one online influencer is determined to save the lost art of heckling.
Meet Trevor Gilmore, or TrevsChirps, as he’s known on social media, a self-styled “professional heckler” who is making waves in Major League Baseball’s bleachers by reimagining America’s pastime’s long-standing tradition of fan taunts.
Gilmore takes a lighter approach to pestering players, a persona he believes fits today’s social media, mental health-conscious and sponsor-friendly era.
“People say awful, personal things about players’ families, but that doesn’t fly anymore,” Gilmore said. “I’m just trying to keep it fun because heckling has been a part of baseball since its inception. We can do it another way — make players laugh, throw them off a little, maybe see a mistake here or there.”
Gilmore says his unique character originated a few years ago when he and a friend, Jaz, who now films all of TrevsChirps’ content, attended a Reno Aces game and left unimpressed with the local bleacher creatures.
“They’re not creative, and it’s personal,” Gilmore said. “It’s mostly just a lot of you sucks. So I’m like there’s a better way to do this.”
With the help of Jaz and producer Cody, Gilmore launched his social pages in late 2022, but it wasn’t until May 2023 that TrevsChirps truly went viral.
“Hey Kevin [Keirmeier], I hear you eat Kit-Kats sideways, you bum!” Gilmore shouted in that 2023 TikTok clip, which has received more than nine million views.
In just a couple of years since then, he’s become an internet sensation, racking up more than a million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram with his antics while traveling to games essentially every other weekend.
Gilmore says fans now flock to bleacher seats near him, recognizing him in the crowd – and some have even gone as far as posing for pictures with and asking for autographs from him.
Even teams are taking notice. Gilmore has a ticket deal with the San Francisco Giants, his “home” team, and has traveled across the country to heckle players at other ballparks, sometimes even given tickets by teams for special games. Minor league teams – desperate for eyeballs on their games – have connected with Gilmore by the dozens.
Players have felt his impact firsthand as well.
“He chirped me and was like, ‘I bet you always three-putt’ in golf,” Padres’ Jackson Merrill recalled, per SFGate. “So for the first month this offseason, I three-putted on every green — something I never do. He got inside my head.”
Gilmore has a running list of roughly 1,000 lines – some positive, some negative – but goes to games with about a dozen jokes written down and gauges the crowd from there.
Some fan favorites include “I bet you wear socks to bed,” and “I bet you leave trash in your friend’s car” – wholesome quips that can get people of all ages to crack.
He’ll also drop the occasional movie quote or song lyric, which always gets the knowing fan.
Gilmore has branched out to other sports, bringing his one-man heckling circus to minor league hockey games and NASCAR races, but has stayed true to baseball, where chirping from beyond the fences has become synonymous with the sport.
“I’m just trying to bring fun and excitement and entertainment back into baseball because so many people say that it’s a dying sport, which I don’t believe for a second,” Gilmore said. “We’re getting people into it that are like ‘I don’t even like baseball, but I would go to a game to see this in person.’”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
