Buck Showalter showed up to Mets camp on Friday armed with stories, none topping one that involved a talent show and two monkeys taking batting practice during his Orioles tenure.
When Showalter was Baltimore’s manager in 2012, the year his group was bounced in a deciding game five of the ALDS by the Yankees, the team put together a talent show, and Flaherty, in what would be his first big-league season, took things to another level.
“Ryan Flaherty brought in these monkeys one time from the zoo that threw batting practice,” Showalter said. “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. I got a call from the Humane Society and the Health Department. We got fined by the Health Department for monkeys in the clubhouse.
“You should have seen these guys throwing BP to each other. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen…They were little bitty ones. They were freaking me out.”
That’s right. Two monkeys stood on opposite ends, and one threw to the other, with the monkey at the plate even making contact.
“They had a little baseball, one of them got on one end…the other one would hit it…we had a stage, lights, the whole thing,” Showalter said. “I’m just looking around and the players are going, ‘Are you sh---ng me?’”
Showalter said the orchestration by Flaherty actually helped him make the team, and he would go on to play in 77 games that season, his first of six seasons in Baltimore.
“He went down to the zoo, he had met this guy at a restaurant, he was a zookeeper, and he said ‘Hey, I got a talent show,’” Showalter said. “Flaherty was a Rule 5 that year. That’s the only reason we took him, because he had the guts to get up in front of the guys with these monkeys.”
Of course, gathering two monkeys from a zookeeper and having them perform a talent that you had nothing to do with in terms of training them doesn’t sound like much of a talent. Well, there was apparently more to Flaherty’s routine, but we may never know what that was.
“There were some other parts to his presentation that I won’t go into,” Showalter said. “But that was the best I’ve ever seen.”
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