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."