This morning there are several questions hanging over the heads of Phillies fans in the wake of Andrew McCutchen’s potentially devastating knee injury. One of the more interesting ones is how much it matters that he might have been lost for the season because of a sequence of events that should never have taken place at all. Had Jean Segura done what he was paid to do – run to first base after putting the ball in play – McCutchen would be in the starting lineup tonight. But because he didn’t, McCutchen is preparing this morning for the MRI tube rather than the Padres.
Baseball history is littered with odd and downright bizarre injuries but they almost all fall into one of two categories – off-field mishaps that are so weird and laughable as to make grudge-holding an impossibility, and on-field collisions/confrontations that make you stand up and cheer rather than rush to assess blame, even when there is clearly blame to assess. The McCutchen/Segura incident falls into neither category.
In the former we have Vince Coleman’s battle with the Busch Stadium electronic tarp during the 1985 playoffs that resulted in a fractured bone in Coleman’s knee that cost him the remainder of the postseason. Awful, yes. Potentially season-altering, yes (the Cardinals won the ’85 NLCS without Coleman but lost the World Series to the Royals). Stupid, no doubt. But so strange as to be oddly charming, if ever such a thing were possible with a knee fracture.
And then there was the time John Smoltz burned himself while trying to iron his shirt while wearing it, and the time Larry Walker missed part of the ’97 season after separating his shoulder while fly fishing, and the time Blue Jays outfielder Glenallan Hill wound up on the shelf with injuries sustained crashing through a glass table after waking up startled and disoriented after a nightmare in which he was being chased by spiders.
In the latter we have Aaron Rowand’s 2006 face-plant into the then-unpadded center field fence in Citizens Bank Park. We could have pointed fingers at whoever it was in the front office who decided that padding was appropriate for seemingly every portion of the outfield wall other than this one but we were too busy praising Rowand’s hustle and determination to bother.
And then there was Ray Fosse’s separated shoulder during the 1970 All-Star Game that both decided the contest and derailed Fosse’s career. Fosse still feels the effects of that injury, nearly a half-century later. It’s “like a knife sticking me in the shoulder,” he said a few years ago of the aftershocks of the collision initiated by Pete Rose in what was a meaningless game to everybody other than Fosse (and, obviously, Rose).
Fosse is forever reminded of it whenever the weather changes, the result of the gift of arthritis bestowed by Charlie Hustle in the 12th inning of the exhibition contest. Still, it was a hustle play, made within the heat of competition between two players trying their best to help their team win the game, and you’ve got to admire that, despite the cost.
Same with Tony Conigliaro’s career-ending eye injury, at the hands of California Angels’ pitcher Jack Hamilton, who beaned him in a 1967 game. The injury was horrific and was clearly at the hand of Hamilton but who could blame him? He was only doing what he was being paid to do.
Not so with Segura. Nobody is paying Segura to stumble out of the box and then stare at the ball as it arcs weakly toward second. Like Rose and Hamilton, Segura is the direct cause of the resultant injury but unlike them, the injury is the result of his derelict of duty, not in the line of it. And unlike the non-baseball injuries, there’s nothing funny about it.
There’s not a man-eating tarp in sight, or a cluster of imaginary spiders to blame. Just a lazy baseball play that not only resulted in a double play but perhaps the end of the season for a player Gabe Kapler has identified as one of this young team’s clubhouse leaders. This injury, if it’s as bad as feared, is going to hurt and it’s going to linger.
The only question is, will it wind up hurting Segura as much as it hurts McCutchen?
