MLB: Spring training has sprung, and so will the jokesters
By Jeff Kallman
MLB: Spring training has sprung, and so will the jokesters
A Little Public Humiliation Never Hurt Anybody
Spring training is a time for reconditioning but also for jokes, pranks, and occasionally reverse acceptance. If Hall of Fame pitcher Catfish Hunter were still among us and not in the Elysian Fields, he could tell you about reverse acceptance.
In spring 1975, Hunter was freshly minted with the New York Yankees, a $3.5 million dollar-for-five-years Yankee, after Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley reneged on a contracted insurance payment, and Hunter took it to arbitration being declared a free agent. Also freshly minted was tall Mets outfielder Dave Kingman, acquired from the San Francisco Giants, whose orbital home runs were equaled only by his prodigious strikeouts and a baseball soul battered by three years worth of contradictory Giants coaching.
Hunter got the starting assignment when the Yankees faced the Mets for the first time that spring. Kingman faced him with one out in the top of the second. Then Hunter hung a changeup and—depending on whose account you believe—Kingman drove it clean onto the practice field behind the field on which the game was played, or onto Saturn’s innermost ring. “[A]bout five feet inside the left-field foul line and about three palm trees high,” Roger Angell described it:
"The Yankees were still talking about the home run the next day, when Hunter told Ron Blomberg he hoped he hadn’t hurt his neck out there watching the ball depart. Others took it up, rookies and writers and regulars, redscribing and amplifying it, already making it a legend, and it occurred to me that the real effect of the blast, except for the memory and joy of it, might be to speed Catfish Hunter‘s acceptance by his new teammates. There is nothing like a little public humiliation to make a three-and-a-half-million-dollar executive lovable."
And there are few things like revenge for one prank to make another million-dollar-plus executive feel as though he’d been bounced around a bit.
When Los Angeles Angels infielder Tommy La Stella was a Cub, he pranked general manager Jed Hoyer’s spring parking spot, and Hoyer retaliated by switching La Stella’s uniform with a set of military khakis. “I had to practice in them,” La Stella tells Rogers. “So next time, I had a bounce house for kids set up in his and [president] Theo Epstein’s parking spot. Only in spring.”