Image
Prior VERBOTTEN, Hendry’s Downfall or Glenallen and the Spiders from Mars
TCR's guest correspondent Joseph Hecht, M.D. is back with a look at the wild and wacky side of baseball injuries.
----
Now that Mark Prior may be the only player in the arbitration process to receive a slight pay cut, he should be embarrassed but definitely motivated to make more money from here on out. No more excuses as to some wacky injury this year, correct? After all, he’s covered every possible thing that can go wrong, right? (Image courtesty of Jeff Roberson/AP)
To paraphrase Johnny Carson’s line to Ed McMahon, “Wrong, oh traumatized Cub one”. Take a look at a few of the baseball injuries he’s yet to suffer. Our pitching prodigy is explicitly forbidden to see this stuff (just in case his ailments are psychosomatic). I “stumbled” onto the True Baseball Injuries website that has some beauties.
Lets start by preventing him from talking to ‘70’s Cub outfielder Jose Cardenal at the next Cub convention.
As a kid, Jose Cardenal must have had some great excuses to get out of school. He wouldn’t dare come up with a lame excuse like, my dog at my homework. He missed a game in 1972 because he was kept up all night by chirping crickets outside his hotel room. Two years later he missed a game because he couldn’t blink, reporting that his eyes were stuck, “open”.
Next I “bumped” into a website called The Baseball Injury Hall of Fame. Their list includes over 30 of the weirdest injuries that have happened to baseball players and of course our Cubs and their maladies have been able-bodied in their representation.
Some of these injury reports are the party line as to what happened. If the truth came out, some of these players just might have violated something in their contract or even worse been the laughing stock of the clubhouse and the whole baseball world. I’m sure they were the latter from those in the know.
Here are few of my favorites, but I’d love to see more from our readers:
We all remember Slammin’ Sammy Sosa was once sidelined for several weeks with back spasms, which he claims were caused by his own sneezing. We’re unlikely to hear what he really was doing, it’s was fun speculating. It was interesting that nobody blamed it on him working out. Rumor has it that he wrenched his back opening a bottle of Creatine.
Cub anti-LOOGY, Mike Remlinger fractured his little finger when he got it caught in a clubhouse recliner. He was told he might as well stay in that recliner because he had to be put on the disabled list for 2 weeks.
Slugger Glenallen Hill, severely cut up his foot causing him to miss several games. Supposedly, he was deathly afraid of spiders and he had a nightmare where he was being devoured by spiders. He was so startled that he fell out of bed, shattering a glass table and then stepped on the glass shards. If anyone see’s Glenallen, please remind him to return my copy of the movie Arachnophobia to me.
Surfing injury? Remember Carlos Zambrano’s non-throwing injury? He developed tennis elbow from using a computer to talk with his brother in Venezuela. Or was he just posting too much on TCR?
Because of Z’s sore elbow, our former manager’s wife supposedly went shopping to help Z recover from that dreaded ailment. Kindly, she brought her hubby’s ace pitcher “ergonomic” equipment for computer use, such as wrist and elbow guards. Reading between the lines, those items just may have been Dusty’s keepsakes she found laying around the house. Were they souvenirs from Barry Bonds locker? In addition to keeping his computer ailment at bay, maybe Carlos The Slugger could use them to dig in like BB does with all his body armor.
It “struck” me that this off season, while Cub General Manager, Jim Hendry signed Ted Lilly to a 4 year contract as he lay on a hospital bed being readied for an angioplasty, it may not have been his first signing of a free agent while being a patient. Apparently. he signed Greg Maddux in February 2004, while in a cast and recovering from surgery for a ruptured quadriceps tendon (the tendon just above his kneecap). He had tripped on a dustpan while carrying his son’s birthday present down some stairs. Could this be his modus operandi we’re seeing? In the next couple of weeks, if we see that Mr. Hendry suffers a severe ankle sprain or a debilitating hangnail, we should all keep our eyes open. It just might be his way of softening up Big Z’s agent, Barry Praver, to get that home town discount this spring, on what we all hope leads to the completion of Z’s very lucrative long term contract.
Comments