Professional athletes like to say they don’t read comments about them on social media, but if former MLB player Josh Rutledge ever broke that rule, he may have seen his own wife mixing it up with the trolls — under a burner account, of course.
Laura Rutledge, Josh’s wife and the host of NFL Live on ESPN, admitted she used to defend him using an account on X with a name that was “like BillyHalo76 or something.”
“This is a true story,” Laura, 36, recalled on The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand’s “Marchand Sports Media” podcast. “I actually think this Twitter or X handle might still exist, but when he was with the Angels. I made a fake Twitter, which I’m admitting this, OK, I know this was wrong. I’m not doing it ever since, but this was a one-time thing.”
“And Billy Halo only tweeted positive things about Josh Rutledge and then the occasional Mike Trout tweet, because I was like, ‘Shoot, someone is going to figure this out,’” Rutledge added.
Josh, 36, played Major League Baseball from 2012 to 2017, but never with the Los Angeles Angels. The Colorado Rockies traded him to the Angels in 2014 — the year after he and Laura got married — and he spent half of the following season in Triple-A before he was again traded to the Boston Red Sox.
Josh retired in 2018 after failing to make the Majors on a minor league contract with the San Francisco Giants.
“I don’t think Josh knows this,” Laura confessed. “If he watches this he’s going to be really mad at me.”
She also admitted that when her husband played, she struggled to ignore fan criticism.
“I really struggled with it,” Laura said. “There were times when he played for the Red Sox … they had him at third base, and he hadn’t played third base since middle school. He barely played third base. And he’s at the hot corner and they’re in Fenway, he has a couple of errors in a game and people are booing him and I’m like, ‘shut up!’”
The year after his retirement, Josh and Laura welcomed daughter Reese. They later had son Jack in 2023.
The X account @BillyHalo76 was created this month and has not posted. It is also following only Laura and ESPN, so that does not appear to have been the exact handle she used. Still, it’s likely that if the account still exists, dedicated social media sleuths will find it.
