Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez, we can take. By now we've grown accustomed to the idea that what we see on the baseball field isn't necessarily real and what players say isn't necessarily true.
But now comes word out of Connecticut of a new scam perpetrated on baseball fans. The New Britain Rock Cats pulled it off the other night with a marriage proposal between innings that went horribly bad, with the woman saying ,"I'm sorry, I can't. I'm sorry" before fleeing.
Except, of course, it was fake, much like the home run numbers in the record books today. Both the man proposing and the woman rejecting him were club employees, playing roles for a YouTube video that has been viewed more than 600,000 times.
Funny, yes, but troubling in a way, too. If the marriage proposal was fake, what does that say about Kiss Cam? Could the sausage race in Milwaukee be fixed, too?
No, not all you see — or hear — can be believed. Here's a few other things in sports you might find hard to believe, too:
OREGON'S PALACE: The floors are Brazilian wood, because apparently there aren't trees good enough in Oregon for the Oregon football team. The locker room has a ventilation system guaranteed to remove all sweat odors within an hour, and the weight room is a 25,000 square foot monument to muscle magnificence. Nike chairman Phil Knight spared no expense in building the new place for the Ducks, even putting a barbershop inside. Couple that with the uniforms that seem to change every game and fans might even forget that Oregon has never won a national championship in the sport.
JOHNNY FOOTBALL: The legend that is Johnny Football grew during the offseason when he took a victory lap around the country after winning the Heisman trophy, tweeted bad things about his university and got booted from the Manning Passing Academy after, uh, oversleeping. Now ESPN is reporting that the NCAA is investigating whether Johnny Manziel took money to sign autographs, which is against regulations that say only grownups who don't play football can make money from it. He's now at Texas A&M football practice, but even Vegas oddsmakers won't post anything on Manziel's chances of being on the field for his sophomore season.
THE SHARK: Jim Dreyer's plan to raise money for charity was to swim 22 miles across Lake St. Clair near the Michigan-Canada border, while towing two dinghies filled with bricks weighing more than 2,000 pounds. The long-distance swimmer who calls himself "The Shark" expected to make the swim in about 30 hours, but it took him nearly 51 hours because of big waves along the way. When he reached Detroit's Belle Isle, though, he only had one dinghy in tow, and no quick explanation where the other one went. "Sorry I'm late," he said, looking a lot like he had been hit by a ton of bricks.
