It was the tweet seen around the world.
As the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians battled into extra innings during Game 7 of the World Series on Wednesday night, a two-year old post on Twitter by a Florida man was playing out with eerie accuracy.
Well almost, fortunately.
On the day Joe Maddon left the Tampa Bay Rays to manage the Cubs — Nov. 4, 2014 — Lenn Fraraccio took to Twitter and tweeted this:
“2016 World Series. Cubs vs Indians. And then the world will end with the score tied in game seven in extra innings. hashtag apocalypse.”
"I forgot I made the tweet," Fraraccio, a father of two and a school supplies salesman, told BayNews9. "So two weeks ago, somebody found that tweet from 2 years ago and retweeted it and said 'Bro, the Indians are in the World Series. How did you get this?'
“I had forgotten. I didn’t even remember I had written it until that guy tweeted at me,” he said.
When Cleveland's Rajai Davis homered in the eighth inning, tying Game 7 at 6-6, "my phone exploded," Fraraccio told WTVT.
It got weirder when the game was delayed by rain as it went into extra innings. Was the apocalypse really coming?
"That's the goofy part where you just roll the dice and you put something on Twitter," Fraraccio told The Hollywood Reporter. "I have the tendency to flap my gums about stupid predictions about other things, so it's just like me.
“But the thing that really freaked people out is when the rain started coming down and people thought the world really is going to end. The timing of that was phenomenal.”
Fortunately for the world, the Cubs went on to win the game, 8-7. No apocalypse, for now.
There were more than 160,000 retweets by Friday afternoon — and even though he is originally from Ohio, Fraraccio isn’t an Indians fan. Or a Cubs fan, for that matter. He is a huge Rays fan and said he was “bummed” when Maddon bolted Tampa Bay for Chicago.
“I just had a feeling that the Cubs were going to be really good, really quick,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I am originally from Ohio, so I also follow the Indians a little bit, and I knew they had a great young pitching staff. … so I knew the Indians would be good in the upcoming years, so I just wrote that down.”
Fraraccio has spent the last few days fielding telephone calls from media outlets and posted on Facebook that his tweet was read on Good Morning America.
Not everyone bought into the tweet. The news-explainer site Vox originally branded it a scam, with writer Aja Romano writing about the tweet under the headline: "That viral 2014 Cubs World Series tweet seems too good to be true. That's because it is." Deadspin leaped to Fraraccio's defense, rebutting Romano's tweet. Vox published a correction on Thursday, noting that Romano's article "incorrectly suggested that we know the tweet under discussion is a hoax."
“There are so many haters coming at me saying it's fake,” Fraraccio told The Hollywood Reporter. “I have two things to say about that: First, I forgot that I tweeted that. Someone found that tweet and sent it to me after the Indians clinched the World Series, and they were like, ‘Dude, the Cubs are one win away from making this the greatest tweet ever.’ Second, the reason it blew up is because yesterday, two Los Angeles sportswriters found it and tweeted it out. So there was a buzz all day with the tweet.”
Still, Fraraccio concedes the tweet was just “blind luck.”
“In the grand scheme of things, it's stupid Twitter,” he said. “What does it really matter? In two days you won’t remember it, you won't remember my name. So, this is my 15 minutes, and I am doing interviews.”
