Two Points: The Worst Injury in Baseball

Other than the occasional play at the plate, baseball is a non-contact sport.  Yet there seems to be a rash of injuries in the sport that just aren’t seen in other athletic endeavors.  Heck there are surgeries named after players in baseball (and diseases while I think of it).  Maybe it’s the length of the season, or the fact that baseball is the only sport other than golf where guys can play well into their 40’s.  Well, unless your name is Alonzo Morning and you only have one kidney.

Injuries are far too prevalent in baseball.  Shoulders, elbows, backs, testicles, eyes, shins – wait, did I just write testicles?  Yes, the man region has been the target of a few well-publicized trips to the DL this season, most recently (and notably) Chris Snyder of the D’Backs going under the knife for what’s been labeled a ‘fractured testicle’ wherein parts of him seem to be oozing out of other, ruptured parts. 

Yeah, so let’s block that last line out of our minds and move on to the question of the day – what is the worst injury in baseball?

This depends on how you define worst.  The obvious choice would be the injury that causes the most pain (see above).  Another school of thought might lead you to choose the injury that creates the longest road to full recovery.  Tommy John surgery, for example, can take up to two years to fully recover from.  Still, the worst injuries off all might be those nagging pulls and strains that never seem to heal properly.  They aren’t bad enough to keep you out of the lineup but they never go away without rest, so you’re stuck playing at 80% all season long. 

Yes there are a lot of injuries in baseball and with all due respect to the

torn-up arm joints, violent sneeze-induced back problems and increasingly gruesome attacks on the wangal (wangle?) region, for my money the worst injury in baseball is the fractured orbital.  Think about it.  Your job as a hitter is to go up to the plate and stare in the face of another man who is primed to hurl a rock-hard sphere at you.  Your only measures of defense are a big wooden stick to swat at said sphere and the notion in the back of your mind that tells you he’s not actually throwing the ball at you, but rather trying to get it past you.  Then whammo! Right in the face. And in the eye to boot.  Talk about parts oozing out of parts.

There goes six weeks of your season to heal, not taking into account the time it will take to learn how to see again. If it’s really bad you’re looking at potential facial reconstruction too. Well, you’re not looking at much of anything because you just took a two-seamer right in the eye. I have to think that stays with you for a long time.  And what separates this injury in baseball from the other sports is once you’re healed you have to go right back up there and get it in your head that it’s not going to happen again. 

No. Thanks. 

That’s my two cents on the matter, and since I couldn’t get Sam Malone to tell me what it’s like to have a groin injury, I introduce Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus – the certified king of all injuries to tell me I’m an idiot and give his take.

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The worst injury? Exactly.

Wait ... that doesn't make sense, I know, but there's a pretty serious scientific basis to that Marxian statement. (Groucho, not Karl.) All you have to do is be honest and count to ten. Let's do a simple exercise here. It will take a couple steps, but it will serve to illustrate my point.

Quick - smack yourself upside the head. No, seriously.

If you're reasonably intelligent, you didn't do it too hard. If you did, you're reading this when you woke up. That latter group should stop reading now and go upstairs to tell mommy what a dumb thing you just did. The former group should quickly rate the pain on a scale of one to ten. Most will say a two or three and in moments, it will be back to zero.

Now, the next step requires some commitment. You need a hammer. Just smack yourself on the hand. Yeah, I know it's going to hurt but that's the point. What do you rate the pain? Four? Five?

I won't take this to the next logical step, but consider what you might rate a nine or ten. Breaking your leg? Fastball off the dome? Ruptured testicle? Ingrown toenail?

Yeah, toenail. Those things hurt man. Women will always say childbirth, but I'm telling you that the ingrown toenail is underrated and that your worst, whatever it is, is the worst. With injuries, there actually is a real concept of "more worst." What fells one man is walked off by another and really, both are medically valid. Healing times, genetics, and medical science all fall to the power of perception.