The best baseball pranks Dirk Hayhurst has ever seen
Pranks are as much a part of baseball life as rosin and sunscreen. 25 guys crammed into half a hole in the ground, forced to play, travel, and live together for seven months is a regular breeding ground for shenanigans.
There's the standard stuff, like shaving cream pies and red hot in the jock strap, or locking a guy in the tour bus bathroom.
There's the kind of stuff that will get you punched, like the ever-popular calling of a teammate from an unknown number in a fake voice to tell them they’ve tested positive for performance enhancing drugs.
There’s also your team specific, right of passage pranks.
When I played in Double A with the San Antonio Missions, you weren’t really part of the team until you’d been “Spidermanned." That was the code name for a prank wherein the victim was first locked in the bus bathroom, forced to fight their way out, and, when they finally burst free, a naked player was dangling from the overhead luggage racks, butt cheeks wide open, waiting for the mark to, in their confusion, stumble in face first.
Yes, nothing says welcome to the team like a face full of dangling bum.
While there was only one Spiderman — thank god — the whole team was involved, and the best pranks always involve the whole group. Everyone has a role, from locking you in the stall, to distracting you when you come out, to holding back their laughter long enough for your face to hit butt cheeks.
The great pranks are always a team effort, and last week, the boys of the Padres Triple A club, the El Paso Chihuahuas, pulled off a prank for the history books.
While you can watch the story for yourself, the gist is, long time Big League regular, Jeff Francoeur, was duped into thinking one of his teammates — Jorge Reyes — was deaf.
It all started on account of Jorge not reacting at a shout to duck as a foul ball came screaming into the dugout. Francoeur turned to the team’s manager, Pat Murphy and said, “that’s amazing, he’s the only one that didn’t move.”
Pat Murphy’s reply: a dry, serious, “Yeah, Jeff, he’s deaf.”
For the record, Jorge is not deaf. He may have been deaf to the call to move to safety in that moment, but he can certainly hear just fine. Francoeur, on the hand, might very well be deaf, or at the very least, blind.
How on earth you can spend a couple weeks of spring training and the first month of the season with a player and not realize they can hear? It’s the kind of obliviousness that deserves, nay, demands a pranking.
As a matter of fact, it’s why teams have Kangaroo courts: When surrounded by peers, what you don’t notice can and will be used against you in a court of embarrassment.
And players in Triple A, where one is prone to the bitterness and dark humor that comes with being so close to the bigs and yet so far away, are always on the look out for someone to embarrass — especially those with loads of money and big league service time. Francoeur’s naïve acceptance that Jorge Reyes was deaf made him the perfect mark.
Credit to Reyes on this one, who had to forgo using is headphones on trips, fight his natural urge to respond to auditory stimulus, and, I can only assume, hide every time he had to take a phone call.
But give the rest of the team credit as well, faking sign language, talking head-on so Jorge could “read lips”, and, hardest of all, not letting on that it was all an elaborate hoax every time Francoeur ate up the act with amazement over Jorge’s incredible story of overcoming adversity.
To be clear, all teams have a guy that’s dumb enough to — what we'd call —"get got.”
In High A, I convinced the new left fielder that I was giving the catcher the signals for what pitch he should call during the game. All I was really doing was screwing around, giving fake signs that no one was paying attention to, and guessing. But, like with Francoeur, naivety and coincidence generated opportunity.
When I missed a pitch, I’d just say the pitcher shook me off. However, I got enough right that the newb next to me in the bench said, “This hitter’s got slow hands, call a fastball here; you’ll blow it by him.”
I went through a series of mumbo-jumbo, a fastball was coincidently delivered, Newb smacked me in the shoulder and said, “You’re welcome!”
Welcome indeed. The next inning, Newb asked me to teach him the signs. I taught him a load of crap, told our catcher that Newb was “calling the game” — wink, wink — from here on. The opposing team put up 6 runs the next inning, we lost, and our boys gave Newb all kinds of hell for blowing it.
It wasn’t until we maxed fined Newb in Kangaroo Court a week later that he found out the truth, in front of everyone’s laughter.
But Newb’s story is the low risk, chuckle-and-a-fine kind of prank that amuses a group of A ballers. The higher you go up the ladder, the more refined and sinister the pranks become.
When I was in Triple A with the Padres, playing for the Portland Beavers, we had a guy who liked to party a little too hard. Since nothing makes for good locker room conversation like extra curricular activities, our party animal gave full disclosure of how he thought he took a girl home the previous night but was actually too drunk to remember any of it. Expressing his concern over what happened was a big mistake.
He should’ve have been more worried about what was going to happen now that we all knew he had a fill-in-the-blank scenario looming heavy on his mind.
Our first step was to give his cell number to one of the girl’s in the team’s front office. Step two was to have her tell him what a great night she had with him. Step there was to wait a few days and then inform him she was pregnant.
In case you were wondering, when the guy you prank starts crying, it loses a bit of its fun.
But only a bit.
Dirk Hayhurst is a former pitcher who spent nearly a decade in professional baseball between MiLB and MLB. He is also an accomplished author, and has appeared on Baseball America, ESPN, TBS' MLB postseason broadcasts, Sportsnet Canada and more. More about Dirk at www.dirkhayhurst.com.