MLB: Spring training has sprung, and so will the jokesters

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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.

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.”

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MLB: Spring training has sprung, and so will the jokesters

A Car Demolition and a Cell Phone Number

Sometimes a prank only looks cruel at first. Twelve springs ago, a Cubs strength coach, Tim Buss, walked out to the parking lot to see his already beat-up old car left looking as though it survived a tank assault. It was also left with the bats and balls used to demolish it. The heartbroken Buss began pondering suspects when pitcher Ryan Dempster led a group of players to own the demolition—and present Buss a brand new Nissan Xterra.

Other times, a young MLB player spots a veteran worth emulating and learns the hard way how not to do it, as the Cubs’ Javier Baez did. “My first spring, I was following Alfonso Soriano‘s routine and hanging out with him, and [pitcher] Matt Garza thought I was big-leaguing everyone,” he told Rogers. “So they got my car and put a big sticker and stuff on it. It said, ‘Rookie on board.’ I had to ride my car like that for a week. It was fun, to be honest.”

Even rookies who become the game’s best players learn the hard way. When Trout was a rook and talked up during then-Angels manager Mike Scioscia‘s team meeting, pitcher Jered Weaver had Trout’s number: Weaver arranged for the scoreboard to flash Trout’s cell phone number multiple times during that day’s exhibition game. Perhaps needless to say, Trout changed his number post haste.

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MLB: Spring training has sprung, and so will the jokesters

Tread Lightly, Not Everybody Takes it Good-Naturedly

Of course, not everybody takes it good-naturedly. Maybe the most infamous example was relief pitcher Jesse Orosco giving freshly-signed Los Angeles Dodgers free agent Kirk Gibson a ghoulish welcome-aboard in Gibson’s first Dodger spring. Orosco smeared eye black around the liner of Gibson’s batting helmet, and when the goo melted down Gibson’s face in the warmth of the field the former Detroit Tigers star exploded.

“No wonder this team finished in fourth place last year,” Gibson thundered.

About a week before Gibson’s orthopedically challenged 1988 World Series-winning Game One, with the Dodgers down a run and Gibson hitting with two strikes and two outs, Thomas Boswell wrote, “Gibson tore the clubhouse up, left camp, criticized his teammates and said that wasn’t how he played baseball like it was some Sunday picnic for laughs.”

So maybe spring training isn’t going to be or supposed to be fun for everybody. Yet Gibson had his soft side, even in the postseason. He’d inscribe a teammate’s initials on his uniform sleeve to brace him up. It might inspire another teammate to say he’d do likewise if Gibson didn’t play the next day. Just don’t expect him to be Costello to somebody else’s Abbotts.

MLB: Spring training has sprung, and so will the jokesters

Leave it to the Hall of Famers, then?

When Ken Griffey, Jr. was still a Seattle Mariner and Lou Piniella was his manager, Griffey lost a bet with the skipper that would cost him a steak dinner. Junior sent Piniella the meat on the hoof, literally: Piniella walked into his office the next day to find a live cow reposing therein.

No bull, it beats the living hell out of a fake arrest warrant. The kind slapped on then-Milwaukee Brewers catcher Gerald Laird in spring training 2007, when his teammate Jerry Hairston, Jr. arranged for two friends with la policia to hand him a warrant for unpaid child support and lead him out of the clubhouse in handcuffs and tears—until Hairston let Laird know it was a gag the moment he was plopped into the back of the squad car.