Twins Scoreboard Was Announcing Trades That Hadn't Actually Happened

The Major League Baseball non-waiver trade deadline is a treacherous time for reporters and studious fans who stake out Twitter for the latest rumors, rumors of rumors and done deals. In these moments before Monday afternoon when the buzzer sounds, it's easy to jump to conclusions at what's being whispered, or to even fall for bald-faced fallacies published on fake Twitter accounts perpetrated by cyber anarchists. Watch out for the fake Ken Rosenthals of the world, people (with "@Kenrosenthai" being the best ever).

This goes for scoreboards at major league ballparks as well. As SB Nation's Twinkie Town reported, one of the scoreboards at Target Field was duped Thursday night into re-publishing an automatic feed from MLB.com that included this post by columnist Jim Duquette about hypothetical trades. At the time, Twinkie Town took note and said this on Twitter:

The Twins are reporting on the scoreboard here that Carlos Beltran has been traded to the Indians…
— Twinkie Town (@TwinkieTown) July 29, 2016

Beltran, to the Indians? He could help! Twinkie Town's report — which was the truth, that the Target Field scoreboard was reporting trades, and that the Yankees had continued their sell-off — made everyone watching excited. Ooh, trades! The Indians themselves seemed receptive to Beltran.

.@Twins thx guys
— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 29, 2016

Everyone wanted to believe. But it was just Duquette (brother of Dan, by the way), riffing on what might happen. But there was no way for anyone sitting in the stands at Target Field to know that, unless they had just read their Duquette primer. So, check out what they were showing the good people of Minneapolis with no context:

The folks at MLB.com eventually put two and two together, though:

Mystery solved. No trades. It was scrolling potential trade partners based on this article: https://t.co/OKqcI2Cc1R https://t.co/55nzZwgL5V
— Rhett Bollinger (@RhettBollinger) July 29, 2016

Not real. Yet, anyway. Instead, a real valuable lesson (again) to not believe everything that you read, especially at the trade deadline. And as for you, Twins scoreboard that will apparently read everything put on the TelePrompTer: