Professional baseball player Jeff “Frenchy” Francoeur believes that his team’s pitcher, Jorge Reyes, has “overcome obviously a lot, being a deaf baseball player,” and “to see the way he’s done it and handled himself has been awesome.”
The 0nly problem is Reyes isn’t deaf.
Francoeur’s teammates pretended that Reyes couldn’t hear and Francoeur believed the lie for almost a month. He only figured out the truth, that Reyes doesn’t have a hearing impairment, when his teammates took mercy on him and told him — but not without filming his reaction.
The prank started when Reyes didn’t react when “head’s up!” was called at practice one day.
Francoeur asked why and the coach said it was because he’s deaf. However, Francoeur must have missed the sarcastic edge in the response and the team ran with it.
The video documenting the hilarious prank title “On Jeff Ears” was put together by first baseman Cody Decker.
In the video, Francoeur is repetitively called an “idiot” by his teammates for not picking up on the subtle hints that Reyes wasn’t deaf, like seeing him talk on the mound during pitcher-catcher conferences.
But in Francoeur’s defense, the team did come up with explanations for each instance and even kept up the act during “intense moments” in games, according to team manager Pat Murphy.
During the month-long prank, the team paid off a waitress to play along at one point, and convinced Reyes’s wife to tell Francoeur she communicated to her husband through “text messages” and “hand signals.”