A new Sports Illustrated update on post-retirement Ken Griffey Jr. has a few fun stories from the Hall of Famer’s life, but the best one involves the time Griffey convinced an 18-year-old Alex Rodriguez that he could get lots of money if he jizzed in a cup.


Junior said he made A-Rod believe that the Mariners had a secret operation in which players would auction off their sperm. Griffey milked the prank, but thankfully didn’t see it to completion:

The year before, he’d pulled a subtler prank on another teammate: Alex Rodriguez, then an 18-year-old rookie shortstop who, like Griffey, had been the top pick in the draft. Griffey enlisted Seattle’s trainer, Rick Griffin, to convince Rodriguez that the club’s stars—including [Jay] Buhner and Randy Johnson—were involved in a scheme to sell their sperm to the highest bidder, as if they were thoroughbred stallions, and that Rodriguez might himself attract an appreciable stud fee. He brought in a fake doctor. “Dude, you got great genes,” Griffey told the rookie. The callow Rodriguez was skeptical at first. Then he started to come around. “How much money do you think we could make?” he asked. Griffey, mercifully, pulled the plug before donations were to be harvested. “Everybody has rookie hazing,” he says. “That was his.”


Considering what we know about A-Rod, he probably found the idea of serving as a stud appealing on several levels.

[SI]