Specializing in baseball injuries
Baseball players have never been known as the blood-and-guts, play-through-the-pain guys of the sports world. That distinction goes to the football and rugby players, the wrestlers and MMA fighters, the boxers and hockey players.
Right or wrong, baseball players are generally considered to fall somewhere above golfers, bowlers and darts throwers on the list of toughest athletes. That perception has been there for decades. And some memorable freak injuries over the years only strengthened that perception.
Five-time American League batting champion Wade Boggs once injured his back putting on his cowboy boots and missed several games. Former Detroit reliever Joel Zumaya went on the disabled list with a wrist injury, the result of playing the video game “Guitar Hero” too much. Slugging outfielder Sammy Sosa went on the DL when he injured his back … sneezing.
And former Pirates shortstop Clint Barmes missed time his rookie season with the Colorado Rockies because he fell and broke his collarbone while carrying deer meat up a flight of stairs.
Children also have presented trouble for ballplayers. This season, the Chicago Cubs lost starting pitcher Matthew Boyd to a knee injury suffered while he was sitting down to play with his kids at home.
Those are the comically funny and unusual injuries. Baseball players, however, have never been able to avoid injuries on the diamond. And if you haven’t noticed, many of these injuries have reached the epidemic level.
Entering Thursday, there were 252 major league players on the injured list – you can’t say disabled list anymore – with a variety of ailments, the majority of them to arms and elbows. The number of players sidelined because of Tommy John surgery is off the charts.
Some players are on the IL because of “modern” injuries, such as torn abductors and strained obliques.
I’m dating myself with this statement, but in my time as a middling athlete – and I use that word loosely – we never had abductor and oblique injuries. Heck, we never knew we had abductors and obliques. If we injured them, we said we were sore.
The rash of injuries in baseball is not limited to the major leagues. In the independent Frontier League, there have been 73 players placed on the injured list in the first 21 days of the season. Some of that is teams hiding healthy players on the IL until needed, using it as a 26th roster spot. But many of those guys are injured, and Wild Things manager Tom Vaeth suspects he knows why, and he’s attempting to take proactive measures.
“I plan to rest guys more this year than I’ve done in the past. That’s out of necessity,” he said earlier this month. “All of us managers were talking about that at the league tryout. Ballplayers aren’t made the way they used to be. I don’t say that to be funny.”
Vaeth says the injury problem is the result of too many young players being one-sport athletes. These are indeed the days of specialization in high school sports.
“Guys today are playing more of their sport than ever before. These kids don’t understand how to develop stamina over the long haul that comes with playing different sports, so you’re constantly moving the muscles in different ways,” Vaeth said.
“Back in our day, your fall sport in high school was this and you played that sport. You played something else in the winter. It wasn’t, I’ll play baseball all fall and I’ll take off the winter and then I’ll play spring ball. Instead, you played that sport, that sport and that sport and it helped you with your hand-eye coordination. More importantly, I think it helped with the physical stamina. I think that’s why you’re starting to see a lot of certain injuries in the game of baseball. When all you’re doing is that one sport, you’re doing the same repetitive motions over and over again, then, yes, you’re only going to hurt certain things.
I don’t think guys train the way they used to. Instead of doing things in the offseason, most of these kids don’t work anymore,” he continued while pointing at his team’s clubhouse. “I talk to them on the phone in the offseason and they say they’ve been training all winter. That means all they’ve been doing is hitting. They don’t go out and run. They just hit. That’s not training. Then they wonder why they’ve pulled an oblique.
“I don’t think the players today are built to play five days a week anymore. Plus, I believe they get coddled. That’s our generation, that’s our society now. Oh, my knee hurts. OK, we’ll sit you for a week. I don’t think anybody understands there is a difference between hurt and injured.”
Sports editor Chris Dugan can be reached at dugan@observer-reporter.com