Felix Hernandez Wouldn't Let Adrian Beltre Take A Shit In Peace
Adrian Beltre and Felix Hernandez have been fucking with each other since the dawn of time. When it’s all said and done, Beltre will be enshrined in Cooperstown as one of the best third basemen to ever play the game. But I think when we look back on his career, aside from the 3,000 hits, the near-500 homers and the multiple Gold Glove awards, baseball fans will look back and remember how Beltre made us all laugh. And, of course, one of the funniest things that Beltre has done over the years is freak out whenever somebody touches his head. People forget that King Felix started that.
And part of it stems from a moment of weakness during a chat with his friend and old Seattle Mariners teammate Felix Hernandez about his head.
“He thought because I have waves in my hair I didn’t want it to be touched,” Beltre said. “I didn’t tell him why. Then one day I told him, ‘I don’t like it.’ And after that, he tried to do it all the time. It was stupid of me.”
When Beltre left Seattle for Boston, Hernandez told fellow Venezuelans Victor Martinez and Marco Scutaro about the cranial Achilles. “It doesn’t hurt,” Beltre said. “It’s just discomfort.” Their dugout antics turned Beltre’s crown viral, and over the past seven years, as he has burnished his Hall of Fame credentials with the Texas Rangers, whose cap he’ll wear into Cooperstown one day, all of Beltre’s foibles have been laid bare by Elvis Andrus and other teammates.
So, Beltre has Felix to blame for the years of dome torment, but when they were teammates in Seattle from 2005 through 2009, apparently that wasn’t the only way that the 2010 Cy Young award winner tormented the 2004 MVP runner-up.
So the bathroom thing. People don’t know about this one. It’s like the head thing, only funnier.
“When I go to the bathroom, I don’t want people to talk to me,” Beltre said. “When I’m in the stall, it’s not a conversation station. If I’m in the stall of the bathroom, I don’t want to talk to anybody. I’m here to do my business and relax. And every time Felix would find out I’m in the bathroom, he would sit in the stall next to me and start talking.”
That’s fucked up, man. That would be my absolute nightmare. Over the course of a man’s day, the one time that we can detach ourselves from the outside world is when we barricade ourselves in the bathroom to take a shit. You’re not expected to be working, doing chores, working out, getting nagged by your wife or girlfriend, changing diapers, or whatever other things that make us guys contemplate wolfing down a cyanide sandwich. Asshole move by King Felix here, no pun intended. All that being said, I hope that there are plenty of King Felix stories in Beltre’s Hall of Fame speech because apparently they’re all great.