“The Number One Trusted Source”

On September 4th 2026, A pitcher was making his MLB debut for the St. Louis Cardinals named Hancel Rincon. During the game, home plate umpire Doug Eddings made quite a stir when he told the rookie pitcher his hat needed to be fixed because it was tilted to the left. This led to a dispute that ended with the St. Louis Cardinals manager being ejected. A lot of backlash followed this due to what was perceived as a power move by a veteran umpire on a rookie kid, and also how tilting your hat in MLB has been done multiple times before with no issue. Not to mention that tilting is primarily something done by players from international countries such as the Dominican Republic, as Rincon is from. There is a lot of great writing already about the culture war in baseball with the amount of players from international countries and their customs clashing with the US-born players. I think this Guardian article sums that up pretty well.

​Okay, so now that we know the context and the backstory, let’s talk about this “post” I found on TikTok.

1. THE POST

This first appeared on my TikTok feed on September 6, two days after the incident in question. I’ll first admit that I believed it and thought it was true. Wow, what a great marketing opportunity and show of support by the St. Louis Cardinals for this young kid. Good job, team! Even the comment section of the post in question didn’t think twice.

The three biggest things that stand out to me as to why this is so believable are

1. This looks like an official tweet from the official account of the St. Louis Cardinals. It has the blue checkmark, it has the right branding. Even the wording feels like a tweet from a sports brand. This looks and feels so real.
2. The person posting this is not a bot. She has multiple TikTok posts, she has multiple followers and following. Her content is all across the spectrum of issues. She shows her face in every post. Following what we’ve learned about bots on the internet, I feel safe in saying that TikToker is not a bot. 
3. We want this to be real¹. What a great thing that we want to have happen. We want the STL Cardinals to be doing this and supporting the player against what can be perceived as a racially charged action. We want to believe that a team would stand against that. We want to believe that this is something that would happen because it’s something good.

I think it’s very easy for someone just passing by, scrolling on TIkTok to see this, believe it, and not think twice about it. I know that’s what I did. This blog post however, is here to explain why you need to question and be critical like a fact checker about what you see, because in just a few short steps I can prove this post is absolutely fake.

2. RESEARCH. 

So going forward, I am going to try to think like a fact-checker. I see this post and think, wow, how nice, what a great marketing attempt, and overall nice support by the STL Cardinals. However, I am skeptical because I follow MLB regularly and was aware of the incident in question, and yet this is the first I am hearing of this giveaway. I check R/Baseball every day, why didn’t I see anything about this giveaway there? I am also skeptical because this is a very quick turnaround for a giveaway, you’re telling me that in only about a week they are going to do this? Teams are not that quick with giveaways. They are planned a year in advance, and we’ve seen players get traded from that team, and yet the team still gives away their bobblehead. These things do not happen that quickly. Also I am just unsure if this random woman from Tiktok who from what I can tell never posts about baseball otherwise, is going to be my only source in this manner. All these factors, plus the fact that this honestly seems too good to be true. Just the idea of the team doing this, saying these things, and making a big show of their support. I just think the whole idea feels a little too good to be true and feels like a fantasy idea someone had more than something that I think would actually exist. These reasons all together make me want to do more research,

​I don’t have Twitter. I will never get Twitter. Elon Musk is an evil, sad man, and though it may be small and insignificant, I have to take a stand where I can. So I am going to find workarounds to see the actual tweets from the STL Cardinals to see if this actually is a real tweet from them. The incident happened on 9-4, and I saw this post on 9-6, so let’s look between those dates.

So, looking between those dates², all I am seeing is tweets about the actions and results of the games that took place and then, of course, that Rincon is being sent back to MILB after all that happened. This is the life of a ballplayer sometimes. 

So the first strike here is that despite this looking like an official tweet involving this giveaway, it seems that this is not an official tweet from the STL Cardinals. Maybe the tweet got deleted for some reason? Let’s keep looking for more proof or not proof and check with the official source themself, the ST. Louis Cardinals official website. They have a full site on their page detailing all their giveaways during the year. It updates after every game, but on the full schedule site we can see past ones. 

So the post in question said this giveaway was on 9/12? According to the schedule here, the only giveaway was a bobblehead. Would there be a reason this maybe didn’t get posted? Did it share the giveaway with the bobblehead? Let’s check the official news section from the STL Cardinals. 

Here are the only headlines from the day of the post (9/6). There is an article regarding the dust up and the support the team had for Rincon, but nothing in that post says anything about a giveaway.

So now we’ve gone straight to the supposed source of the giveaway, the STL Cardinals’ official Twitter account didn’t post this. On their official website, there is nothing to suggest this is something that actually happened or was even planned. I think the next step is to search for the actual giveaway event itself and see if any source other than a TikToker posted about this.

Right away, we are led to an Instagram account called “mlbonfax” that also posted about this. What’s notable is that this post also features the same tweet that was originally on the TikTok video..

This page features a quote from Skip Simpson, a supposed VP of marketing, Let’s look him up.

Searching his name gives away a key detail that is important to our investigation. 

Yep. mlbonfax is a parody. They don’t even hide it, it’s right in their page.

A search for mlb on fax shows that their whole thing is just parody posts about MLB. I guess they at least acknowledge it in the details and don’t try to hide it.

And here we got the same fake post on their FB page as well.

Clearly, this site and its creators get their fun from just sharing satire posts about MLB like this, both social accounts have multiple posts a day sometimes. This one has 211 likes on FB, and that’s a pretty high number for them compared to their other posts, so clearly this one made it through the filter and got some people to believe they are legit, like the TikToker at the beginning of this whole investigation.

3. Lessons to learn/Takeaways.

So this research has shown that when you see something on the web, it’s important to think critically about it and be willing to fact check other sources. Through simple lateral reading, I was able to disprove this post in mere minutes. Lateral reading is all about verifying information by checking your story or sources amongst other websites and research. By checking the STL Cardinals Twitter account, their official website, and then just searching the information at hand, I was able to find the source of misinformation and prove without any doubt that the post at hand is not true in any way.

​Lateral reading is so important, you have to be critical of what you are reading, check your sources, and check your information to see if it matches what else is out there. This is one of the simplest and quickest ways to verify. If this post has been true, by simply checking and finding the tweet in real life and seeing that it was indeed a giveaway on the Cardinals giveaway schedule, I could’ve just as easily verified it was true. These tools are important and necessary to stay on top of misinformation in our modern world.

​You can’t just trust what you read. You need to reach out and check and verify and make sure that this information is elsewhere. Any one site can mislead you, clearly, this one site and one post misled multiple other people and me on TikTok. The worry I have is that those people on that TikTok believing this is true, or even the women who posted the tweet believing it was true, are just one of so many who saw or read one thing, believed it without any second thought, and posted it or shared to others, thus spreading what may be less harmful misinformation but still misinformation. This is why it is so critical to get out and teach everyone these tools and teach them to think like fact checkers because it’s so easy for people to fall for misinformation, as i have hope this paper has shown.

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4. Appendix

I just want to write some short paragraphs about my fascination with this beyond the whole fact checking part. Why does mlbonfax do what they do? Is there that much money to be made in engagement? I’m guessing that just posting false stories gets engagement, and I’m sure they make some money on that, but is it that much? This is clearly the least harmful misinformation out there, no one technically gets harmed from believing this, but it’s still spreading false information, and what gets gained from that? Is it just trolling? I really want to know how and why someone gets started on this train of sharing fake satire posts and the joy or gain they get from it.

​Also of note, since it looks like we are going to start talking about social sites moderating false information. I reported this post to TikTok as being false information, and this is what I got back. So who knows how good TikTok is at actually knowing what is and isn’t false..

1.  I will add that even though this give away isn’t a real thing happening, the STL cardinals and the other team they were playing the night of the incident have absolutely shown their support and protest about what happened to Hancel Rincon.
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2.  Thank you https://twitterviewer.net/Cardinals 
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