We've seen it many times before. While MLB fans - at least the attentive ones - know which Twitter accounts to pay attention to during crucial junctures throughout the year, there's always that one fake Twitter handle that gets us every once in a while.
It happened this year at the non-waiver trade deadline. The one of many FOX Sports' Ken Rosenthal Twitter accounts reported Yoenis Cespedes going to the New York Mets before any of the famous blue checkmark reporters did. Obviously it was a blind guess like the rest of the account's tweets, but the "report" just so happened to be correct shortly before it was widely confirmed.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But I think Fake Ken Rosenthal was 1st to report the Cespedes to #Mets deal. Guy deserves a raise.
— Jerry Crasnick (@jcrasnick) July 31, 2015
Touché, troll.
Then came this offseason. Many of us spotted a couple of baseball writers weigh in on the fraudulent trade between the Phillies and Astros. A fake account impersonating Evan Drellich of the Houston Chronicle said the Astros were sending pitcher Lance McCullers and first baseman Jon Singleton (and perhaps one more player if I remember correctly) to Philadelphia in exchange for closer Ken Giles.
The two clubs did end up making a deal for Giles this offseason, but it was nowhere close to that one and it occurred days after. However, the few moments before many realized it wasn't real could have been characterized as mayhem.
So the question remains - why do people have nothing better to do than make up rumors, trades, signings and other significant happenings throughout the MLB or other major sports just to irritate or fool others?
Well, Kyla Wall-Polin at The Hardball Times took it upon herself to try and figure that out. Here's her experience from talking with an Internet troll who runs an unverified Twitter account impersonating a well-known reporter in order to perpetuate unfounded discourse/conversation.
"After several attempts, I finally found a faker who would agree to speak with me.
"That person is Greg, and he was pretending to be Michael Baron, who has written about the Mets for SNY.tv and MLB.com.
"I asked Greg if breaking fake trades is a long-time hobby. Nope, he said. He's never done it before. Why Baron? He's local, and big names like Rosenthal and Heyman were 'already taken.' Why did he decide to do it? Boredom. 'Boring baseball offseason. Bad NFL season.' (Yet another thing to blame on football!) By the way, despite his choice of people to impersonate, Greg is not a Mets fan; he's a Yankees fan. He's quick to add, 'I'm not looking to mess with no one's career. Just trying to get a rise out of some of the public.'"
Instead of volunteering at a soup kitchen or shoveling snow after this recent blizzard, "Greg" apparently utilizes his time to epitomize the modern day Internet troll - an individual who uses the web as a veil and cannot muster up the courage to leave his/her parents' basement to show their face to the harsh outside world. Well, that's perhaps the layman's definition. Wikipedia defines Internet troll as "a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion, often for their own amusement."
Who knows, maybe "Greg" does meander amongst the rest of us and acts as this Internet version of Keyzer Soze. We'll probably never know.
Nonetheless, it's a significant societal issue when individuals have to resort to making things up and then use the Internet as his/her forum to spread that information to a) get people mad; b) fool others who might be too quick for their own good; or c) clog up Twitter and other websites with useless information, which moves others further away from the truth.
All of this makes for an angrier world. It's disturbing the peace amongst the online community. Think I'm exaggerating? A recent study found Internet trolls are sadists. That's right, somebody who experiences pleasure from the suffering of others.
If you'd like to know more about how nobody likes Internet trolls, click here and fast forward to 2:35.
Here's an idea for those of you that can't seem to pick up a hobby and make better use of your time: do something constructive. Learn how to play an instrument. Teach yourself a new language so maybe you can travel to another country one day (and get out of that cold basement). You can even make your own blog and provide your take on certain topics to perhaps facilitate intellecutal conversation.
Well, maybe that last one is going too far, because these types of people have no concrete stances, opinions or even organic thoughts (and if they did, we'd probably never know). They're just phonies, who, as The One Man Thrill Ride Jimmy Preston says in the video link above, "are living up to, approximately, I don't know, 32 percent of their genetic potential."
That means you have 68 percent to fulfill, phonies.
