As a longtime sports fan (short for fanatic), I have held the belief that professional baseball players have more fun together than do the players in other pro sports.

I mean, they call baseball players the “BOYS of summer,” don’t they?

They don’t call pro football or pro hockey players “boys,” do they?

Maybe the boyish exuberance in baseball is necessary because of the long hours the players spend together from spring training through, for many, the postseason.

And maybe their often-juvenile antics and pranks are vital in combating the relentless, intense daily pressure of battling for a position, a contract, a pennant or a wild card.

I have been reading two hilarious books on the subject. The books are by former major-league-players-turned-announcers, Jay Johnstone and John Kruk.

Johnstone regales the reader with some wild diamond lore in his appropriately titled tome, “Some of My Best Friends Are Crazy.”

Kruk got the title for his lunatic look inside the locker room from the occasion when a lady in an upscale restaurant observed the slothful Kruk guzzling several beers. She approached him, and this conversation followed:

LADY: I am appalled to see an athlete with such terrible training habits.

KRUK: I ain’t an athlete, lady, I’m a baseball player.

That infamous line is the title for his book.

If you follow major league baseball very closely, you know about the shaving cream pies and the various uses of atomic balm. You have heard of the masks, the snakes, the odd objects found in lockers, the hotfoots, and the shoes nailed to the floor.

You may have heard of the relief pitcher running in from the bullpen trailing a roll of toilet paper that his buddies attached with tape to his unsuspecting backside.

And you may know about Casey Stengel going to the home plate umpire dressed in a raincoat and carrying a lantern in a vain attempt to get a game called. Or when Casey doffed his cap during the national anthem and a bird flew out.

Both Johnstone and Kruk give the reader page after page of baseball humor and it makes for some hilarious summer reading.

For example, Johnstone tells about the day when a startled teammate slid into second base from first at the exact same time a teammate slid into second, arriving from third base.

For another example, there was the time when pranks got so out of hand in Boston that Red Sox captain Carl (Yaz) Yastremski had enough, so he went from locker to locker and cut 6 inches off each teammate’s dress pants’ legs.

Kruk says that “In the Phillies’ clubhouse, if you called somebody a psychopathic idiot, it was considered pretty much a compliment.”

The imaginative nicknames alone are worth reading. Many of the stunts are not ones you want to try at home, or anyplace else for that matter.

Then there was the player who proposed moving first base back a foot (to 91 feet).
When asked why, he said, “To eliminate close plays.”

Both books are full of stuff like that, like the following television interview:

ANNOUNCER: Where are you from?

BALLPLAYER: New York.

ANNOUNCER: What part?

BALLPLAYER: ALL of me.

After reading these two books, I am even more firmly convinced that pro baseball players DO have more fun.

Neosho Daily News