St Albans Messenger, 11 May 2010
In the wake of an explosive sleep-related scandal involving legendary DFW outfielder / somanambulist Ken Griffey Junior, the St Albans Messenger was able to catch up with the longtime Spurs slugger in that period just after lunch (aka "The Lunch Coma") when you either really want to take a nap, or alternatively you want to hit 5th in a 1pm game, facing the fastest moving baseballs on the planet and attempting to utilize a round stick of wood to forcibly redirect said baseballs onto a 90 degree slice of turf defended by 9 elite athletes.
When we caught up with Griffey (.156/1/4 in 45 ab's) in the 7th inning of the recent DFW-LCC tilt, Junior was sitting on the end of the visitor's dugout bench comfortably snuggled into his officially licensed Spurs Snuggie (tm). Alarmed at first at Junior's lack of response to stimuli such as loudly calling his name, shaking him by the shoulders, flicking the lights on and off, and pulling the pillow out from underneath his head, our roving reporter quickly called for the Spurs team trainer and SleepNumber Mattress spokesperson, Lyndsey Wagner.
Wagner quickly quelled our concerns by holding a mirror in front of KGJ's mouth and showing us that it fogged up in just a few seconds. "See?" said Wagner, "Junior's not dead, he's just getting his game face on. As you well know, visualization is an important part of success in the batter's box. And what else is REM sleep (the most restful and restorative form of sleep, and the part in which dreaming takes place) if not just an elaborate form of visualization?"
"You see, if we want Junior to hit a homerun in his pinch-hit appearance in the 9th, what we tpyically do is induce a deep trancelike state in him in the 5th. Since we've found the agile-minded Junior to be immune to classical hypnosis, we find the best way to induce this pre-visualization trance is to give him a nice warm glass of milk and tell him a beddy-bye story (currently his favorite is "If you Give a Moose a Muffin.") In the rare event this doesn't work, that's when we really break out the big guns. We're talking lullabye's here, "Rockabye Junior / on the Treetop," the whole nine yards. Maybe we even have him count some sheep. But sometimes we run into trouble with that strategy, because he'll get as far as 1-2 and then just start taking sheep pitches until there's a full count. Then all it takes is one more high and inside sheep, and then he think's he's drawn a sleep-walk. Total somnambulism - he just starts heading to first base. More than once we've had to tackle him, which breaks the trance and pretty much ruins any chance he had for a full visualization of his upcoming pinch-hit at-bat."
Intrigued by this unexpected story line (here we just thought maybe he was hung over or something and wanted to catch some Z's), we then asked the next obvious question: Does anyone ever play any pranks on Griffey while he's asleep?
Rolling her eyes, trainer / mattress huckster Lindsay Wagner (sleep number: 49) said "Yes, yes of course. As trainer, I try to keep things like that from happening as much as possible. I mean sure, the old 'spray shaving cream in the sleeping Junior's palm and then tickle his nose with a feather' seems funny to the other benchwarmers, but they're not the ones that have to try to drag a groggy Griffey to the eyewash station to get the Barbasol out of his million-dollar retinas."
"And the rumors that Freddy Sanchez is on the trade block mostly because of a gag involving a warm bowl of water and a messy biohazard cleanup? Well, let's just say there's more than a little truth to that."
Throughout his own in-game interview, Ken Griffey Jr was lightly snoring and could not be reached for comment.
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