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Stephanie Apstein of Sports Illustrated explores the (not so?) merry prankster side of Jacob deGrom.
deGrom's eyes light up when a teammate enters the clubhouse wearing unfashionable shoes. He once watched Syndergaard struggle to balance on a bosu ball; the next day, players walked into the training room to see deGrom standing serenely—and pointedly—atop it. Another time, after a string of interviews during Pete Alonso's Rookie of the Year season, deGrom turned to the kid. “It's the New York Mets,” he said. “Not the New York Petes.”
He intimidates younger players and peers alike. “When I first showed up, for probably the first two years, three years, it was like, I don't know if you're my friend or if I should be deathly scared of you,” says center fielder Brandon Nimmo, who has played with deGrom since 2016. “It's kind of both.”
deGrom enjoys keeping people off balance, both at the plate and in the clubhouse. Sometimes he will ask new members of the organization startlingly personal questions, just to see how they react. “He's testing you,” veterans explain.
And it's hard to be sure of his mood. “You walk up to him, and he looks like he wants to choke-slam somebody,” says Ricky Meinhold, who was a pitching coach in the Mets' organization from 2019 through '21. “And then he'll change that thought and say, ‘Hey, Ricky, how ya doing?'”
Some of this behavior may seem mean. People close to him insist they cherish it. “He's not a bad guy,” Nimmo says. “He's a really good guy. He will throw some pranks out there, he can throw some one-liners at you, but it's all in good fun.”
Indeed, sometimes the hassling feels more like an honor. Meinhold can't quite decide how to feel about the fact that he eluded deGrom's pranks.
“I'm lucky, I guess,” he says. “Well, I guess not, at the same time, because the people that he does do those things to he absolutely adores, whether he'll say it or not.”
deGrom learned from the best: Wright was the team prankster for most of his career. He, too, targeted Taglieri, once having his car set on cinder blocks and the tires distributed throughout the stadium—one on Taglieri's couch, one among fans on the berm in the outfield, one in a pitching machine in the batting cage, one on a backfield.
At first, deGrom was the victim of Wright's sense of humor. For the first three years of his career, any time deGrom piped up, Wright and bullpen catcher Dave Racaniello would round on him. “Weren't you in Triple A, like, six months ago?” they'd ask him. Wright would challenge deGrom to games of pluck and then beat him so badly deGrom would throw his cards in the air.
As a rookie, deGrom once made the mistake of laughing when a teammate made a joke at the captain's expense. So Wright grabbed a pair of scissors and turned his jeans into jorts. “You could almost see a little bit of buttcheek,” says Wright, clearly still delighted with himself. “We paraded him around the hotel.” (Wright adds that he paid for a replacement pair.)
But soon they realized they were better as a team. One day Taglieri walked into the facility to find that the lock on his office door had been changed. Wright and deGrom finally gave him the key … and watched, cackling, as he realized they had paid someone to come in overnight and erect drywall inside so that the office was now two feet wide by two feet long. The walls were painted; Taglieri's family photos hung on hooks.
“I can't get to them, because they tell me, ‘We have a lot of money, and we have a lot of time. You'll never get even,'” Taglieri says.
The Mets still speak with awe of one of the few people to pay deGrom back. Former assistant hitting coach Pat Roessler, quite reasonably, “wasn't crazy about rats,” says Nimmo. So during a series at Fenway Park when the team spotted a rodent in the dugout, deGrom spent the night touching Roessler lightly on the shoulder with a wrapper and rolling small objects by his feet.
Later, deGrom returned to the clubhouse to find his street shoes nailed to the floor of his locker.
“That was pretty good,” says Red Sox catcher Kevin Plawecki, who played with deGrom from 2015 through '18. Plawecki has his own victory story: He once sprinkled Hi-C drink powder in deGrom's cleats before a workout. When deGrom took off his socks, he realized his sweat had combined with the powder to stain the soles of his feet beet red.
“But you gotta be careful,” says Nimmo, “Because Jake doesn't stop.” |
https://www.si.com/mlb/2022/07/29/jacob-degrom-daily-cover
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