Today is the anniversary of the cruelest prank in MLB history
Friday marks the 10th anniversary of perhaps the greatest baseball prank ever pulled.
The year was 2008 at the Philadelphia Phillies spring training facility in Clearwater, Florida.
Veteran pitcher Brett Myers decided to play a prank on young gun Kyle Kendrick, who was in just his second year in the majors at the time.
While the pitchers were hanging out in the Phillies facility, manager Charlie Manuel called Kendrick into his office to tell Kendrick that he had been traded.
Trades are part of MLB life, so Kendrick was initially nonchalant about the news.
But the peculiar thing about this deal was that Kendrick was “traded” from the Phillies to the Yomiuri Giants of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League.
Such a trade is impossible given MLB’s Japanese Posting System, under which a Japanese team must “post” a player with a release fee that another team would have to pay in order to sign him.
Myers told CSN Philly he took two weeks planning the charade to make it seem legit.
“Now knowing me, I wanted everything covered,” Myers said. “I went the extra mile to make sure that this looked as real as possible. I had to get the front office involved. I had to get Charlie [Manuel] involved. I let the media know about it — keep them quiet. I had to get the traveling secretary involved. We had to make it look as good as possible. It took two weeks of planning to make sure everybody was on board before we pulled the prank off.”
He went as far as having a media presence in the locker room to get Kendrick’s reaction to being “traded.”
“Kyle Kendrick has been moved to the Yomiuri Giants, in exchange for Kobayashi Iwamura,” said a Phillies executive, naming a fictional pitcher.
It wasn’t until Myers told Kendrick he had been “punked” that the young pitcher suspected anything fishy.
The 2008 practical joke has since been ranked the No. 1 prank in MLB history, according to MLB.com.
Myers says the idea for it actually came from former CSN Philly reporter Leslie Gudel.
“Leslie Gudel came up to me and asked me if I wanted to be part of a prank to pull on Kyle Kendrick,” Myers said. “Basically, they had run this prank a long time ago. Larry Andersen had done this to someone else. So, they asked if I could do it to someone and I said, ‘Yeah, I have the perfect guy.'”
According to Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald, Kendrick is still salty about the prank, especially his agent’s role.
“I fired him that year, and that was part of it — I was upset about it, because after that I went and talked to the media,” Kendrick, who’s currently a free agent, told Silverman for a story last March. “So if he had told me, ‘No it was just a prank,’ I would never have talked to the media. Or, I would have turned it around and I would have flipped it on them.”
Myers said he wonders about that.
“If Kyle was so hurt by it and it affected him like that, then why did he allow this guy to write this article to bring it back up?” he said. “All he did was stir the prank back up and continue to let it get more views on YouTube. The 10-year-old kid that never got it, that are now 19 or 20 years old, are watching it.”
To Myers, whose last year in the majors was 2013, the prank was nothing compared with some of the things he endured.
“I had guys take my clothes and put them in ice and freeze them,” Myers said. “They put them in a bucket of water, then put it in the freezer. All my clothes. And I came back to a block of ice with my clothes in it. Baseball is all about pranks and being funny and having fun.”
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