ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Ben Zobist of the Tampa Bay Rays slept right through Thursday’s rumor that he had been traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“I was napping, to be honest,” Zobrist said Friday of a fake tweet that had briefly turned into television news the previous day. “I didn’t see any of it. My wife texted me. She said: ‘Hey, I’m getting texts from people saying that we got traded.’ So I started looking around the internet to see if I could find anything, and at that point everything had already been taken off.”

Zobrist had taken his son, Zion, to an early dentist appointment on an day for the Rays.

“Then I went home and started watching everything (in the final hours before the trade deadline) and then I crashed,” he said. “When I woke up, it was all said and done. I saw that (David) Price got traded, and then my wife started texting me.”

Julianna Zobrist, returning from a trip to Los Angeles, was concerned about reports that turned out to be bogus.

“I called my dad and said: ‘Hey, have you seen anything on TV? Because Jules is getting texts from friends,”’ Zobrist said.