One Damned Expensive Ring

(Warning: This blog is about baseball. For those not interested in baseball, go do the crossword puzzle or watch a football game or whatever non-baseball fans do this time of year, because frankly, I’m not sure what that is.)

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So the dust is settling over infields across North America and in a couple of days the season will be over and the wacky world of division championships will begin. And both New York teams will be – most likely – going into the post-season without two of their key pitchers.

The Mets’ Pedro Martinez is a mystery to me. Here is a man who wears his emotions on the sleeve of his jersey (a good quality in my lexicon of male behavior, normally), and yet he can play almost half a season with an injured shoulder and either not know it or not tell anyone about it. We heard all about his calf muscle woes, and he took time off for that and rehabilitated. But the shoulder - something that could have been caught early, iced down and shot full of cortisone (if required) then surgically repaired in the off-season - has now become a full-blown rotator cuff tear and will keep him out of not only the post season but the first half of next year as well.

Randy Johnson is a different story. Well, not really so different. As I recall (and you Yankee fans will have to help me out because I follow the Mets more closely), he’d been on and off the rotation a couple of times for back spasms throughout this season. And I don’t know exactly how they treat that in the futuristic world of professional sports medicine, but I imagine they’d iced him down, given him cold laser therapy, given him chiropractic treatments and massage, and plain old stretching and strengthening exercises or whatever they needed to do to patch him up and prop him back on the mound. And now it turns out – days before the end of the season – that he’s got a herniated disk, and thanks to an epidural injection, he’s a “possibility” for the post-season.

Now, excuse me, guys. I’ve been hanging around a physical therapy clinic for the past year and a half, and I’m a damned good eavesdropper (if I do say so myself). And I have a herniated disk. I also know that it’s possible to have a herniated disk and never know about it until you do something (say, twist in an awkward way or put too much stress on your spine) that causes it to press on a nerve. Then you have pain. And you get treatment – proper treatment – lest you continue on with your bad habits and rupture the damned thing. And then you really have a problem. You don’t get shot full of an epidural anaesthetic and then go pitch five or six innings of 90 mph fastballs, for Christ’s sake.

Yes, I know. That’s how you win the World Series. I saw Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. They’ll probably put it in Cooperstown along with those obnoxious rally monkeys, unless it’s already there. I know about the guy who went through almost half of a big football game with a broken leg. Even though I’m a girl and didn’t participate in a team sport outside of gymnasium intramurals, I know about adrenaline. I know about playing through pain.

But what they’re doing with Randy Johnson – and a lot of other big leaguers – is how you end a career. Because if that disk ruptures, even with the best surgeons and physical therapists, his pitching days are done. OK, Randy’s getting up there, maybe he doesn’t have another season left in him. But for a guy who has pitched lights-out for so many splendid years, is this any way to have him finish?

And more and more these days, this kind of treatment is becoming the rule. Screw his future, do what you can to get the job done, win the big game. More and more, I’ve seen pitchers - younger and younger pitchers - throw stuff that puts their limbs at such precarious angles I wonder why they’re not on the chiropractor’s table after every start – and maybe they are. Keep this up for eight, nine, ten years and your back will be shot, too.

And people bitch about how much these guys get paid. It’s not for the present. It’s for their future, when they’ll need surgery and physical therapy and Vicoden and OxyContin. Then for the bail money they’ll need when drive around doped up and hit someone. Then the rehab for when they have the tearful press release that they’re addicted to painkillers.

OK, enough with the cynicism. Enjoy the games. May the team with the best trainers win!