Our AZ Diamondbacks had a post entitled " We are heartbroken to hear of the passing of a beloved member of the Diamondbacks community at just 28 years old.". Now I know he never played for Dbacks.
So I look him up, and I find post after post with the exact wording, but the team changed: " We are heartbroken to hear of the passing of a beloved member of the [insert team name here] community at just 28 years old." And they all have clearly AI generated videos of him in all these teams’ uniforms.
So what’s up? What meme did I miss? And why did this kid, who actually played about five games for UTSA, get all this attention? Reminds me of the “tourist guy” photo from the top of the WTC on 9/11. Educate this olde farte.
Well, I hadn’t seen anything about the late Mr. Graner until your post, so I looked him up as well. Looks like all the fake videos are on Facebook…I saw videos purported to be from the Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Phillies before I stopped.
Somebody is doing some crappy things that are soiling the memory of this young man.
I couldn’t decide if it was some stupid, sick joke making fun of an innocent guy, or some fun joke, that maybe Mr Graner would have liked. Hence this thread.
The funeral home seems legit - it appears on Google Street View - although there’s an obituary on the front page for a “John B. Sloope” (born 1928, so his parents weren’t Beach Boys fans), which is odd.
If the next thing we see is a bunch of go-fund-me (or equivalent) pages appear for raising money to send the guy’s kids to college we’ll know what’s up. A scam.
I’m not interested enough to run it down, but someone ought to dig around to find out whether this was ever a real person, or simply a non-existent sob story to anchor a scam.