@Cripplecreek Some classic baseball practical jokes:
* Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette were inveterate pranksters. One of their longest running gags
was hiring limousines to bring certain opposing players to the games . . . players whom either
Spahn or Burdette owned. (Joe Garagiola was said to be a frequent recipient of such largesse.)
* Mickey Mantle once told rookies Joe Pepitone and Phil Linz they'd arrived, it was time to go
out with the big boys, so just take a cab to the Flame in Detroit and ask for Whitey Ford's table.
Pepitone and Linz dressed to the nines, hailed a cab for the Flame . . . and learned the hard
way the once-venerable rhythm and blues restaurant was long since closed and broken down
in one of the city's worst slums.
* Bo Belinsky once talked a lady friend of his into calling fellow Angels pitcher Dean Chance,
with whom Chance had once had an affair, and telling him she was pregnant and he, Chance,
was the father. Chance panicked. When he saw Belinsky in the hotel lobby and told him
"something terrible's happened," Belinsky deadpanned, "Calm down, Dean, you're acting like
an expectant father." Chance chased Belinsky around the hotel furiously until he couldn't
help laughing.
* Juan Marichal's favourite prank was to hand teammates elaborately carved glass bottles
of perfume to give their wives or girlfriends. The hapless players and their ladies would learn
the hard way the perfume bottles were actually loaded with stink bombs.
* When Joe Torre was with the Mets toward the end of his playing career, he was looking
for a way to get teammate Dave Kingman, mired in a slump, to lighten up. He noticed
Kingman shared his thing for cigar smoking and had an idea. When Kingman went up
to bat, Torre snuck into the clubhouse, spotted a cigar in Kingman's locker, and inserted
a small explosive load into it. After the game, Kingman lit up and
kaboom! Kingman
had a hearty laugh and managed to find out the identity of the culprit without Torre
knowing. The next day, Torre lit up a cigar in the clubhouse before a game and
kaboom!The two spent the rest of the season in a kind of contest to see who could put the louder
loads in whose cigars first.
* Seattle Pilots pitcher Fred Talbot once received genuine legal papers naming him in a
paternity suit. He learned the hard way it was a prank hatched by his roommate, reserve
catcher Merritt Ranew.
* Oriole relief pitchers Eddie Watt and Pete Richert spiked the Pilots bullpen's water cooler . . .
with live goldfish. (Watt and Richert were also supposed to have started a tradition in the
Oriole pen for awhile---taking a tip from Whitey Ford's old habit of laying a checkered
tablecloth, a wine bottle with a candle, and Italian bread and cold cuts on the Yankee
bullpen, Watt and Richert started having wienie roasts in the Oriole pen.)
* Jim Bouton walked into the Pilots clubhouse one day and discovered his game spikes
were nailed to the floor. The culprit: fellow relief pitcher Gene Brabender.
* Bob Feller was said to have a small handheld device that could produce spider webs. Feller
would use it only when visiting homes where he knew the lady of the house was particularly
Felix Unger-like about cleanliness and neatness.
* Righthanded Lew Burdette once posed for his baseball card as a lefthanded pitcher.
* Jay Johnstone once locked the door to Tommy Lasorda's office . . . with Lasorda inside,
and also took the clubhouse phones off the hook so nobody could hear Lasorda calling
for help to get his office unlocked.
* Johnstone also once replaced the portraits of celebrities Lasorda rubbed elbows with with
goofy pictures of assorted Dodger teammates.
