Mesa Community College has an enrollment of 25,960 students, which is gigantic for a community college. The school also has a baseball program and apparently, the Thunderbirds thought they were getting a really good transfer student for the upcoming season.
Well… yes. If Chicago Cubs first baseman and National League Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant was a college student, and not a major league baseball star.
Bryant and RedBull teamed up to prank the team, which you can see in the following video. Didn’t anyone on the Thunderbirds recognize Bryant’s face?
“He’s a big donkey, he’s got crazy power,” Mesa head coach Anthony Cirelli told his team about their new recruit, in on the joke too. ”He can help us. Guys who are pitching are going to lose some innings. Guys who are hitting are going to lose at-bats. If he gets us to Oklahoma [for the College World Series] and we win another ring, no one’s going to be complaining.”
And Bryant’s alias for the day? Roy Nabryt, a combination of ROY for Rookie of the Year and Nabryt being an anagram of Bryant. He was supposedly a player from Europe who joined the team late because of visa problems. Bryant got into character in a nearby RV. His accent wasn’t very convincing, but his home run power during batting practice certainly was.
Oh, and how were the Mesa players not tipped off by having all the cameras around? To set up the prank, the camera crew spent a week with the team, pretending to be part of the school’s video team which was doing a feature on the baseball program.
Bryant is becoming quite the prankster. You may remember him from such gags as going undercover as a Lyft driver who wasn’t recognized by his passengers despite him making several references to baseball.
https://youtu.be/xaUf1R7Tvv8
[RedBull]
