TAMPA – The clubhouse pranks for the Yankees have picked up this spring, and last year’s No. 1 pick Andrew Brackman, who is rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, has been hit hard. He walked to his locker yesterday morning to find that all of his sliders, his baseball underwear, had been slit down the middle.
Brackman’s Yankees cap suffered a similar fate. Brackman tossed it in the garbage and then saw the worst of the damage. Six pairs of workout shoes, including brand new spikes, had their shoelaces cut by a Pinstriped Jack the Ripper. The laces were sliced tongue to toe right down the middle, so Brackman, who signed a $4.5 million deal, spent a good part of the day re-lacing his shoes.
“Man, they got me good,” he said.
Brackman, who is 6-foot-10 and a former North Carolina State basketball star, has been getting hit for a while. Seems his vehicle sometimes disappears in the players’ parking lot. The prank war escalated because Brackman fired back on a veteran player.
“If you get hit by a veteran and fire back,” one Yankee insider noted, “they come at you 10 times harder.”
The word is that you don’t mess with relievers LaTroy Hawkins or Brian Bruney. Ian Kennedy told Brackman to “wave the white flag,” but the right-hander has yet to do it.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Kennedy warned.
Hawkins, for his part, said he did not take direct part in yesterday’s attack. While looking over the damage, he did say, “My people took care of some business.”
Brackman is a YouTube star, too, where he gets dunked on by North Carolina’s Reyshawn Terry. Brackman insists it was a charge and appears to be correct. Still, Bruney did point out that the video has been watched 54,000 times. Hawkins, a former Indiana All-State basketball player, said he will never get on Brackman for getting dunked on because, “You have to give the man credit, he played in the ACC. I respect that.”
“I’m not quitting,” Brackman said of the prankster battle.
Asked if he had any advice for the 22-year-old, Hawkins offered, “You got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.”