Every insider's nightmare happened to Bruce Levine on July 14: a message meant for a Cubs coach's phone landed on the public timeline instead, reportedly needling club president Jed Hoyer and GM Carter Hawkins with a nickname straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Levine yanked the post about 34 minutes later, per the Chicago Sun-Times, and later apologized directly to Hoyer and Hawkins, who accepted it. But 34 minutes is an eternity on the internet, and Barstool had already screenshotted everything.
I thought I spoke fluent Bruce but I can’t decipher this one. Someone help me out here please
That's the thing about Bruce Levine tweets in a vacuum — without the context of a coaching staff group chat, the message read like a riddle. It took the Cubs beat piecing things together, and outlets like the Sun-Times and Yahoo Sports confirming the private-text theory, for the internet to fully understand it wasn't a hot take. It was a mistake.
Oh man what I would give to be a fly on the wall to see Bruce’s face when he realized he hit tweet instead of text 😂😂😂
Naturally, someone had to dig up the receipts. barstoolWSD floated a decade-old memory of Levine allegedly firing off an equally-not-meant-for-Twitter post back in 2016, the kind of unverifiable Barstool lore that exists purely to pile on. Whether or not that one's real, it set the tone: this wasn't Levine's first rodeo with the send button, at least according to internet legend.
Big Cat, never one to let a gift like this sit unused, spent the better part of the morning building an entire bit around it. He opened with a nod to the old-school-ness of tweeting a text at all, then escalated with the internet's go-to visual metaphor for chaos.
Bruce Levine
From there it turned into a full bit: Big Cat joked about wanting a livestream following Levine around and floated giving away a PlayStation in his honor — pure Barstool escalation, not literal plans. By that afternoon he'd pivoted to an actual invite, asking Levine to come talk baseball on Wake Up Barstool, which at least suggests no hard feelings on either side.
Gotta give away a PlayStation my guy @MLBBruceLevine
For a guy who's covered Chicago baseball for decades, this is a rough news cycle to be the story instead of the one breaking it. But Levine's apology to Hoyer and Hawkins appears to have squashed any real fallout in the Cubs organization, which means the whole thing lives on mostly as a running Barstool gag rather than a lasting controversy. Given how quickly these internet moments usually fade, don't be surprised if Levine himself ends up laughing about it live on Wake Up Barstool before the week is out.