In the age of the internet, and even before, famous people have all too often lived through public reports of their own deaths. Sometimes those reports are deliberate hoaxes, but others — as happened to one of baseball’s biggest superstars on Sunday — are simply careless mistakes.

Sunday’s false death report came from one of MLB‘s most respected insider journalists, Bob Nightengale of USA Today, who took to his X (formerly Twitter) account with the intention of eulogizing a colleague, the award-winning San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller. Sadly, Miller passed away on Saturday following a two-year battle with bladder cancer at age 56.

Unfortunately, when Nightengale attempted to post his own tribute to Miller on his social media account, he mistakenly named the deceased person as “Bryce Harper.”

For the record, the 32-year-old Harper, a two-time National League MVP whose 13-year, $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies was the largest in U.S. sports history at the time he signed it in 2019, remains very much alive.

In fact, even as Nightengale was mistakenly posting his message, Harper was playing in his 13th spring training game of 2025. And while Harper lives, his bat on Sunday seemed a bit lifeless. The eight-time All-Star went 0-3 before being removed from the game.

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“Awful news: Bryce Harper, the talented and sharp-witted columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, has passed away at the age of 56 from bladder cancer,” wrote Nightengale in his mistaken social media post.

Nightengale took just four minutes to fix the mistake, replacing Harper’s name with Miller’s. But four minutes on the internet is more than enough time for a mistake to be screen-captured and immortalized.

Four minutes is also plenty of time for other social media users to notice a gaffe, and roast the user who made the error.

Another commenter suggested that Nightengale “should not be employed,” while still another recalled an error in a post by another MLB insider, Jon Heyman, in which he accidentally typed the name of Yankees’ superstar Aaron Judge as “Arson Judge.”

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