I spent half of Tuesday night trying to figure out if it was more important to post about potential local stories related to the tariffs on Chinese goods or a deep dive on how social media posts of the past may shape the Oscar race for a trans-best-actress nominee.

Then, the most insane and yet somewhat believable post showed up in my Facebook feed, thus sending me down a ridiculous rabbit hole to prove a point:

Gorman Thomas was the only first-round pick of the Seattle Pilots in 1969. By the time he was ready to make his major-league debut in 1973, the team had relocated to Milwaukee and become the Brewers.

Thomas had a tremendous power swing that had him leading the AL in home runs twice in his career. He also was an all-or-nothing guy, in that he led the league in strikeouts twice as well, finishing his 13-year career with a .225 batting average, 268 homers and 1,339 strikeouts. He also remains among the most beloved of Brewers of all time, mainly because he seemed to typify the Milwaukee way of life.

He once co-owned a bar with fellow 1980s Brewer Pete Vukovich called “Stormin’ and Vuke’s” where he’d belly up to the bar like he was one of the guys on your softball team. He was always happy to sign an autograph or take a photo with a fan. He was more of a shot-and-beer guy, according to the people who knew him, than some sort of high-brow snob. He also abhorred decorum, so I could totally see something ridiculous like this fart thing happening.

I got to meet “Stormin’ Gorman” at a golf outing one year. He is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, but his handshake could crush stone.

The fact check took about 20 minutes, starting with a Google search of terms like “Gorman Thomas” “fart” “fire” “spring training” and “Alfredo Griffin.” Only two or three hits came back in any combination of those terms, and they all somehow either linked to this post or were on social media sites that didn’t reference a source for this story. (I also included the misspelled version of his first name “Gorrman” that the original post reference. It didn’t change anything.)

I then went to Newspapers.com to do a search of similar terms, during that time period and came back with nothing. Sticking with that database, I looked for Brewers news on or around the date of March 20, 1979, which the original social media post listed for this supposed “fart heard ’round the world.” This story poked the first major hole in “fartgate:”

The story notes that both the Wednesday (March 21) and Tuesday (March 20) intrasquad games for the Brewers were rained out, thus making it unlikely that Thomas hit a double in a game that didn’t exist. However, it wasn’t clear from this which team the Brewers might have played, so back to the internet I went, looking for some information on Alfredo Griffin.

It turns out that Griffin was in his first season with the Toronto Blue Jays, so I did a quick search to find out where the Jays held their spring training in 1979. According to the history of the Grapefruit League, the Blue Jays trained in Dunedin, Florida starting in 1977. Based on the dateline from the previous article on the Brewers, Milwaukee took part in the Cactus League, training in Arizona. This would seem to make it improbable that the Brewers played the Blue Jays in spring training.

A quick check of Newspapers.com for the day in question has the Blue Jays playing the St. Louis Cardinals, losing by a 7-2 margin. A box score from that day shows Alfredo Griffin didn’t even play, let alone get set on fire by a flaming fart:

Long story short, this absolutely, positively, never happened on that day or any other day that we can prove. So, what’s the point of this seemingly pointless exercise?

For starters, it’s another example of how digital media is giving us some form of brain damage, in that any idiot with an internet connection can make a specious claim about anything, and thus get hundreds of thousands of people to see/believe it. I honestly felt like sharing this post simply because I saw it and I liked it.

Then, my journalism brain kicked in.

Second, because so many people are pumping ridiculous stories like this into the social media streams of people who don’t have a half-hour to kill before sharing a story like this, we find ourselves having a lot more trouble trying to parse fact from crap.

My kid often brings me a TikTok story about some insane, but possibly true, situation like a cop killing a killer’s kid, a group of people being attacked for wearing the wrong thing or ICE raids on a church. Each time, I find myself digging around to debunk it, in hopes of showing her to become a critical thinker. Each time, I find myself thinking, “I wonder how many people just believed this and were impacted by it without knowing it’s total garbage.”

You could always argue that the Gorman Thomas post is “just a goofy sports story” so it’s not like it’s “really that important.” OK, fine, but what about this post?

As I was writing about Thomas, Amy showed the “End Racism” post to me on her phone and asked, “Did you hear about this?” My answer was that I had heard something about it, but I couldn’t say for sure how much of that post was on the money.

It turns out that, according to two sources quoted in the New York Times, the league had planned to change the “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” The photo with this post is cropped tightly, but a wider shot used in the Times shows the signage on the stands, which clearly indicates this is from last year’s Super Bowl.

As Gronk is fond of saying, we’re now in Super Bowl LIX….

The pairing of the image with the post’s text makes it seem like the league had set up everything already, only to back pedal on this and grab a bucket of paint because Trump was showing up.

The league’s spokesman said the decision for selecting the slogans was an attempt to be uplifting in the wake of the difficult moments the country has endured, from the terrorist attack in New Orleans to the fires in California. He also noted that the league rotates slogans frequently, as the AFC Championship game didn’t have the End Racism call to action, but the NFC Championship game did.

The Times article mentioned that Trump was attending, but the article didn’t state the administration had asked or that the NFL had offered to cut the racism slogan on Trump’s behalf. Other articles on the topic noted that the decision to change the slogan came on the same day as the announcement that the president would attend the game, but didn’t go any further than that.

So, yes, it’s true that this is happening, and yes Trump has spoken out against DEI initiatives, and yes he’s going to the game. But, no, they didn’t paint over something and, no, nobody asked/demanded/whined for this to be done. Beyond that, it’s conjecture, unless I’m missing something because I don’t follow Trump on Truth Social.

The bigger point here is that trying to figure out what to believe and how upset to get about it can be absolutely frickin’ exhausting and most people aren’t going to take the time to do this. They’ll likely believe and share whatever they want and the cycle of “Did you hear about…” will perpetually continue until something really bad happens as a result of one person going one step too far with one ridiculous story that goes viral and ends up causing some real damage.

This is why good journalists and journalism matters. By making sure you’re reporting fact-based content in your own work while also using critical thinking to root out BS stories that are just weird enough to be believable, you can stack some sandbags against the flood of misinformation the public faces every day. No, you can’t solve every problem, but if you can stop someone from spreading misinformation, or help them find ways to debunk dumb internet rumors, you’re making a difference.