RANCHO CUCAMONGA – The Twitter account @MLBDeadlineNews sent its first tweet on July 23, 2015, announcing that Scott Kazmir had been traded from the Oakland A’s to the Houston Astros. This was true.

The account had more than a thousand followers by Tuesday morning, when it reported Dodgers prospects Yusniel Diaz, Dustin May and Errol Robinson were part of an “official” trade to the Baltimore Orioles for Manny Machado. This was false. Yet by Tuesday evening, two more widely-circulated tweets made the same claim. Robinson and May were later mentioned in a tweet from @MLBPipeline, an account run by Major League Baseball itself.

By 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, May decided he’d had enough. His phone was blowing up and he had a game to pitch on Wednesday for the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, the Dodgers’ Class-A affiliate.

“I didn’t want to deal with it anymore,” he said.

So May did a rare thing for a 20-year-old: He turned his phone off.

May said his adrenaline rush dissipated in time to fall asleep by 1 a.m. Wednesday – “pretty average,” he would say, for a gameday start. Still, he woke up in the morning not knowing if he was pitching, if he was traded, or if one of his teammates would be playing for another team by the end of the day. He turned his phone on but turned off all notifications from Twitter and Instagram.

Every July, this is the reality for professional baseball players across the country. They are familiar to casual fans by many names – prospects, minor leaguers, assets – other than their own. But they have mothers, like Suzanne May, who was hoping to fly from her home in Fort Worth, Texas this week to see her son pitch for the first time since spring training.

Last August, Dillon May purchased tickets to fly from his home in Stillwater, Oklahoma to Midland, Michigan to watch his younger brother pitch a game for the Great Lakes Loons. Shortly thereafter, Dustin May was promoted to Rancho Cucamonga and Dillon missed his chance.

Now there was talk, all of it ultimately false, that May would either be traded or promoted before Wednesday night’s game in Rancho Cucamonga. When the rumors reached Suzanne May, she did not want to make the same mistake as Dillon. She never bought a ticket.

“I am definitely ready to see him,” she said.

It’s not easy being the actual parent of a 20-year-old whose life plans are in limbo. Drew Saylor, the Quakes’ manager, is a kind of surrogate parent to dozens of them every year. Saylor does not wait until the trade deadline to remind his players to take each day at a time.

“It happens pretty frequently with all the players, not necessarily about trades and acquisitions but just life,” he said. “Throughout this whole process they’ve asked questions about ‘hey what do you think’ and ‘what would be the likelihood of me moving.’ My job is to say, ‘we’ve got to worry about today.’ Get them back focused on the process for them individually and for us as a group.”

Sometimes that’s easy.

May arrived at LoanMart Field around 4 p.m. Wednesday. Despite the rumors, May said he had no trouble going about his routine. He slipped a white uniform over his lithe 6-foot-6 frame. He finagled a pair of earbuds around his giant mop of red hair, queued up a gameday playlist of hip hop, rap, rock – “I grew up on pretty much every genre,” he said – and stepped outside the clubhouse to let the 97-degree heat wash over him.

Around the time May reached the ballpark, farm director Brandon Gomes was notifying five players – Yusniel Diaz, Zach Pop, Dean Kremer, Rylan Bannon and Breyvic Valera – that they had officially been traded.

Now came the hard part for Saylor. Bannon, a 22-year-old infielder, had been with the Quakes since the beginning of the season. He overcame a slow start to hit .296 with 20 home runs at the time of the trade. As his performance improved, his personality emerged, Saylor said. Teammates gravitated toward him.

“We went just him and I into my office and said, hey, I got a call from B.G., you’re part of the Machado trade,” Saylor said. “There was kind of the whole gamut of emotions. … My message to him was, I understand you’re going to go through all these different things. There’s going to be disappointment, there’s going to be sadness, because what you’re familiar with is not going to be that way. There’s going to be a substantial change in philosophy, in region … the whole nine yards. But the Baltimore Orioles just said that Manny Machado is going to the Dodgers and we want you.

“Really, it was us celebrating what he’s been able to do this year for us but also get him to recognize the organization he’s going to believes so much in him that they chose to make that move. There are moments that I was tearing up, he was tearing up.”

As he hugged his now-former teammates, Bannon was still wearing the same sleeveless gray T-shirt he wore to infield drills a few minutes earlier. He was in no rush to leave.

Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner and Alex Wood were sitting on a boat in Lake Tahoe when the trade became official. Turner’s wife, Kourtney, shared a video of the two players reacting to the news.

“We got Manny,” Wood says, looking up from his phone.

“We got Manny?” Turner responds. “We got Manny!”

The two men high-fived.

The prospects saw this clip and decided to spoof it.

Inside the Quakes’ clubhouse, pitcher Isaac Anderson sat in one cold tub. Pitcher Ryan Moseley sat in another. Casey Ploehn, the clubhouse manager, grabbed two pairs of goggles left over from last year’s playoff-clinching celebration and handed one to each player. Pitcher Logan Salow held up his phone and started recording while Bannon watched off-stage.

“They got Banny,” Anderson says, looking up from his phone.

Moseley jerks his head out of the water, goggles on.

“They got Banny?” he asks.

Then infielder Zack McKinstry enters the room from off-camera.

“They got Banny? No!” McKinstry says, clutching Bannon’s jersey as he walks across the room.

May wound up pitching that evening against the San Jose Giants after all. The first batter he faced hit a ground ball to the shortstop, Gavin Lux – another player mentioned in rumors throughout the week – and reached base when Lux couldn’t field the ball cleanly. May allowed five runs over the first two innings, then retired nine of the last 10 batters he faced without allowing a run. The Quakes won, 15-6.

After the game, May could finally relax. He said the flow chart of emotions reminded him of last year, when teammate A.J. Alexy was part of the Dodgers’ package to acquire Yu Darvish from the Texas Rangers. In all likelihood, he knew the ritual would repeat again.

“It happens,” May said. “It’s baseball.”