Yankees Vets Give Brackman The Business. Top 2007 Yankees draft pick Andrew Brackman has learned a valuable and vital lesson in the baseball world. Mainly, don't mess with the vets. Brackman has been targeted as a favorite for rookie hazing and mistakenly fought back [via his own orchestrated pranks] against a veteran. This is a no-no in major league locker rooms, something Brackman now understands.

The clubhouse pranks for the Yankees have picked up this spring, and last year's No. 1 pick Andrew Brackman, who is rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, has been hit hard. He walked to his locker yesterday morning to find that all of his sliders, his baseball underwear, had been slit down the middle.

Brackman's Yankees cap suffered a similar fate. Brackman tossed it in the garbage and then saw the worst of the damage. Six pairs of workout shoes, including brand new spikes, had their shoelaces cut by a Pinstriped Jack the Ripper.

"Man, they got me good," he said.

Brackman, who is 6-foot-10 and a former North Carolina State basketball star, has been getting hit for a while. Seems his vehicle sometimes disappears in the players' parking lot. The prank war escalated because Brackman fired back on a veteran player.

"If you get hit by a veteran and fire back," one Yankee insider noted, "they come at you 10 times harder."

The word is that you don't mess with relievers LaTroy Hawkins or Brian Bruney. Ian Kennedy told Brackman to "wave the white flag," but the right-hander has yet to do it.

"It's only going to get worse," Kennedy warned.

Hawkins, for his part, said he did not take direct part in yesterday's attack. While looking over the damage, he did say, "My people took care of some business."

As the Phillies veterans illustrated recently when Punking Kyle Kendrick into thinking he'd been traded to Japan, MLB practical jokes can get rough. Tread lightly big Brack-man, tread lightly.