Team Admits Staging Fake Proposal, Rejection

The hundreds of thousands of people who cringed in embarrassment (or laughed) at a guy having his marriage proposal publicly shot down can stop cringing (or laughing). Turns out it was all a hoax by a minor league baseball team, reports the Hartford Courant. The video went up on YouTube last week and shows a man on bended knee being rejected by his supposed girlfriend at a New Britain Rock Cats game. It's been viewed more than 700,000 times and gotten coverage at ESPN and elsewhere.

But apparently the secret got too big to keep: "We worked with two of our employees on the skit and executed a digital strategy to set the video on a viral path," says a statement from the double-A team. It goes on to apologize to anyone who might have been offended but says it was all in the name of entertainment. "We could not be more pleased with the outcome." (More marriage proposal stories.)