MLB: Spring training has sprung, and so will the jokesters
By Jeff Kallman
Spring turns young men’s fancies to love. Spring training is known to turn them into comedians, with pranks flying as prodigiously as home runs.
Classically, spring is when a young man’s fancy turns to love. “Love is the most important thing,” said Hall of Famer Yogi Berra once upon a time, “but baseball’s pretty good, too.” And in spring training, the comedy’s pretty good, too. Baseball’s young men have always turned toward laughs you can’t necessarily get away with on a regular season.
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Faulty GPSes, real or in minds, rank rather high on that list. “Every time we get into a car, you double-check that address to get to the park,” says future Hall of Famer Mike Trout to ESPN’s Jesse Rogers. “It’s not a good feeling when you go to a different ballpark, especially when it’s further away than you expected. I’ve done it, but I caught myself in time. Like when the Cubs moved to their new complex a few years ago.”
Sometimes you come out to your car and discover it’s been disappeared or otherwise incapacitated, as one Cub, Kris Bryant, observes.
“Of course we’re preparing for the season and we care about that, but you can have more fun because it doesn’t matter,” Bryant tells Rogers. “Like towing people’s cars because they’re not supposed to be parked in certain spaces or putting them on blocks. If we did that during the season, people would be like, ‘What is this team doing? They’re a joke’.”
When the New York Mets were a delivered newborn for 1962, the legend has it, their manager Casey Stengel rounded his new team up aside the first baseline, pointed four times around the infield, and then proclaimed to open their first spring training, “Them are the bases.” Fat lot of good that did the team who began life going 40-120 with an indelible image as baseball’s version of The Ernie Kovacs Show.