Jon Heyman reported J.D. Davis trade that didn’t happen, cited ‘miscommunication’ in deleted apology tweet

Lots can go wrong in attempts to break trade news. It’s unclear exactly what happened in the case of Jon Heyman’s report on New York Yankees’ infielder J.D. Davis, but something certainly was messed up there.

The Yankees designated Davis for assignment Sunday to make room for the newly-acquired Jazz Chisholm. But while that designation immediately removed Davis from their 40-man roster, it gave them seven days to either trade him or put him on outright or conditional release waivers. And for a moment around the MLB trade deadline Tuesday night, it looked like a trade would happen.

That saw Heyman (currently of The New York Post , MLB Network, and Chicago’s 670 The Score) report “JD Davis to Rays.” And that sparked a lot of retweets and commentary. However, 19 minutes later, Heyman said there was no trade, and offered an apology. Both his initial tweet and his apology have since been deleted; here’s a screenshot of both (via a Slack discussion of them).

Much of the initial commentary on Heyman’s tweet of the trade remains on X/Twitter, though. Here’s some of that:

And some sites that reported on this initial Heyman report in good faith, including MLB Trade Rumors, had to quickly change course. The MLBTR piece on this was speedily updated to “J.D. Davis Not Traded To Rays,” and properly referenced Heyman’s report and subsequent recantation, but its URL still references the initial headline of “Rays acquire J.D. Davis.” And more remarkably (and problematically), one aggregator account did a full graphic on this that remains up on X/Twitter, citing not Heyman but “The New York Yankees”:

The Yankees have traded DH/INF J.D. Davis who was DFA’d on Saturday to the Tampa Bay Rays in exchange for cash considerations.

Davis, 31, was DFA’d by the Yankees on Sunday when they needed to make room for new acquisition Chisholm Jr. on the active 26-man roster. #RepBX pic.twitter.com/CJxmBCzjzW

— Yankee Source (@yankee_source) July 31, 2024

Interestingly enough, beyond not deleting that tweet, that account hadn’t offered a single follow-up 12 hours later. So that makes it hard to take them seriously as the “#1 Source for all Yankees News” they identify themselves as in their X/Twitter bio. (Granted, they only have 557 followers, and the tweet here only got two likes and two retweets. But they also didn’t offer a correction or update on Instagram, where their post (which remains up, but with comments limited) received 60 likes.

Back to Heyman, this is far from the first insider report to go wrong. And, as noted, a contributing factor here was likely the flurry of activity around the deadline; Heyman’s timeline shows an incredible amount of trades he was reporting on Tuesday (with him breaking some of those and confirming others’ reporting on others), and he wrote an extensive piece on the deadline as well. But this still was an unusual and notable misstep. And while Davis could still wind up with the Rays (with the deadline passed, he’ll have to be placed on waivers, and they could claim him there), he did not Tuesday.

[MLB Trade Rumors]