Practical Joke on Batboy

Ah, and therein lies the danger in never hearing any old baseball stories or reading baseball history. I believe the first guy to be sent for the key to the batter's box was Wilberforce J. Peacock in 1862........

when i was about 13 i worked as a dishwasher. the cook yelled over for me to get some snowflake. i figured he's messing with me ,so i head into the freezer and start scraping the frost into a pot. i'll fix him ,i'll get the snowflake. the owner comes in looks at me,like only someone who's the boss can. what are you doing he ask's, getting snowflake. snowflake is mashed potatoes in the resturant world. needless to say i felt as dumb as a stump.
but those things are all part of the master plan.

Funny thing about the Giles story ... I seem to remember we had a short note about that in the paper back then, because of the left-handed fungo bat. BTW, Brian had one of the stronger arms I'd seen over the years in the league back then, probably second only to Jay Buhner.

Another batboy story, ironically also from the New York-Penn League, when I covered the Newark Orioles:

Middle-End of the season, the players arranged with the plate umpire to have the batboy thrown out of the game in like the third or fourth inning. Everybody was in on it, from the players on both teams, the reporters in the pressbox, the managers, even the kid's mother. He gets tossed, has to leave the field. The crowd doesn't know; once they figure out what happened, they start booing like crazy. Then the players tell him about the $100 fine that goes with an ejection, payable in cash right away, otherwise you are suspended and the fine multiplies. The kid, who was a good kid but had gotten a little cocky of late, was just devastated. About an hour after the game was over, somebody (I think it might have been the team's manager), finally told the kid it was a joke. The batboy was decidedly lower profile for days.