Start Calling Josh Hamilton Chipper!
Hamilton is just getting used to his star status in the league, so we’ll give him a pass on an odd injury he sustained while engaging with a fan during spring training earlier this week.
It turns out that “Big Ham” can’t handle a pop can any near as good as he can handle his bat because he chipped his tooth while holding that can with his teeth while signing an autograph for one of his adoring fans.
Team officials stated that it wasn’t serious and his pearly whites will be just fine after he visits with the Dentist to avoid looking like he should be on a hockey rink instead of a ball field!
It’s amazing the injuries professional athletes sustain off the field and you’d figure that playing the game would be much more hazardous to their health, but in certain cases it seems like some athletes are more of a danger to themselves off the field.
Take for instance, what happened to super diva receiver Plaxico Burress at a New York night club this past NFL season! For those of you that don’t follow football or have a T.V., “Plexi-Glass” shot himself in the leg while showing off his hand gun to another teammate! Not only did he inflict bodily damage on himself, but he damaged any chance of the Giants repeating as Super Bowl champions because he was suspended for the remainder of the season!
Another strange injury comes from one of baseball’s greatest players to ever play the game, who has built a reputation for silly injuries that have hurt both himself and teammates over his long career!
Ken Griffey Jr. broke his hand while supposedly arm wrestling with his son and missed a significant amount of time that season waiting for that hand to heal. Forget the broken hand, someone should have checked Jr’s fragile psyche to see if he felt emasculated from his kid from reenacting a scene from Sylvester Stallone’s box office crash movie Over The Top.
Legend also has it that Griffey got himself in a pinch during a game with the Reds, when he was a little too rough adjusting his cup and pinched one of his berries hard enough that he had to miss the remainder of that game! I guess a big league cup is designed to protect you from a 90 MPH fastball, but is not safe to adjust when you’re administering the manly shift!
Heading back to football, it’s hard enough for kickers to earn respect in a league that’s dominated by genetic freaks that take severe punishment from hand to hand combat during their entire careers and I’m sure their fraternity wasn’t so happy to see one of their members tarnish any progress of that respect ever happening after making a field goal.
Apparently, Bill Grammatica of the Arizona Cardinals thought football kickers celebrated scoring the same way futbol players do every time they score a goal!
Back in 2001 the annoying brother of the Saints Martin Grammatica, kicked a field goal against the Giants in a game that meant absolutely nothing for his team, but someone forgot to mention that to Martin because he reacted like he just hit a game winning Super Bowl field goal as time expired!
His celebration was very brief though because the town idiot of Phoenix managed to tear his ACL once he touched down on the ground after jumping around like a Ballerina at New York City Music Hall! I don’t know what Grammatica should be more embarrassed about...realizing he’s solely responsible for ending his career or that his vertical was no more than 4 inches!
Lastly, I bring closure to this article by throwing the Astros Hunter Pence under the bus for thinking that he was a member of the Fantastic 4 and could make himself invisible to walk through solid objects. During his rookie campaign last season, Hunter Pence must have been drinking more than Meg Ryan’s character in When A Man Loves A Woman because he walked through a glass door on his way to a hot tub during spring training. It’s been rumored that Pence will test his abilities again by trying to run through the center field wall at Astros stadium. Let’s hope Hunter doesn’t end up like Bump Wills in The Natural!
Anyway, I could dig up enough research on silly sports injuries to write my own coffee table book for your reading pleasure, but I wouldn’t want to bring bad karma on myself for poking fun at other people for being careless morons!
Ouch…I just broke my finger after hitting my exclamation key too hard…That will show me!
Play The All American Home Run Derby Contest This 2009 MLB Season!