The Pecan Park Eagle

As veteran sportscaster and fine sports author Greg Lucas calls it in “Baseball: It’s More Than Just a Game”, injuries to players that keep them from active service to their clubs, indeed, can be weird. As one who once threw his back out by reaching down to pick up the morning newspaper in the front yard, and earlier, suffered a broken rib from a reunion hug from an old friend, I get it. Any amusement at these incidents experienced by The Pecan Park Eagle comes only as a statement of empathy for all fellow sufferers of improbable pain and inconvenience.

In his book, Greg Lucas provides us with a plethora of fine examples. I wouldn’t attempt  to count and number all the examples that Greg provides because the order and filing of these events isn’t necessary to the point they all make: Not just baseball, but life itself is weird.

When it comes to the appearance of sudden pain and frustration from the occurrence of the improbable, former Astros and Cardinals pitcher Joaquin Andujar probably put it best for all of life when talking specifically about baseball in response to a question about why things happen as they do: “I’ll give you my answer in two words,” said Andujar. “You never know.”

Here are my Ten Favorite Weird Baseball Injuries from Greg Lucas’s book:

10) Former Atlanta pitcher Jamie Easterly pulled a groin while watching TV.

9) Former Astros infielder Geoff Blum had to go on the disabled list after he injured his elbow while putting on his shirt after a game.

8) Pitcher Adam Eaton stabbed himself in the stomach with a knife while trying to remove the shrink wrap on a DVD.

7) Chicago Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano injured his elbow from spending too much time on the computer e-mailing friends and family back in Venezuela. (A lot of us need to watch out for this one – and most of us don’t even have a lot of friends and family back in Venezuela.)

6) Pitcher Glen Harris could not work after he sustained an injured elbow from flicking sunflower seeds.

5) Minor leaguer Clarence “Climax” Blethen once bit himself in the butt on a sliding steal attempt at second base. He had been carrying his false teeth in his back pocket.

4) Pitcher Rick Harden once strained his shoulder trying to turn off an alarm clock.

3)  Jose Cardenal missed Opening Day in 1974 because he slept on his eye wrong.

2) Former pitcher Rick Honeycut once was ejected from the mound for defacing the baseball he was using in the game. Immediately thereafter, Honeycut wiped his forehead, only to open a bleeding cut. He was still wearing the taped tack on the hand he had been using to doctor the baseballs.

1) This one also belongs on the “Dumb and Dumber” List as well. – 2015 Hall of Fame Inductee John Smoltz once burned his chest by attempting to iron his shirt while he was still wearing it. (Maybe they should inscribe that feat on poor John’s new Cooperstown plaque.)

The new book by long-time FOX broadcaster Greg Lucas, “Baseball: It’s More Than Just a Game,” is a lot more valuable than the time it takes readers to work their ways through the 214-pages of of the facts presented and then clear by the bibliography that supports their authenticity.For me, it truly was – and still is – one of those books that “you just can’t put down.” – You can’t put it down because, once you get beyond the mere  considerable entertainment value that awaits any reader who lives, eats, and breathes baseball, it remains forever an excellent reference book on all the intricate parts that go into making up the body of the soulfully giant American game of baseball.

I even awoke this Saturday morning from a dream about the time my father hired me at age 14 for the first paying job I ever had beyond the nickles and dimes he paid me for extraordinary chores at home. Dad was the Parts Department manager for Bill Lee Studebaker on Lawndale near 75th in the Houston End back in 1952 and he had hired me to help him do the dealership’s annual stock inventory. In the dream, it was almost as though it were happening again. I could hear Dad’s instructions. I could even see what appeared to me as hundreds of little drawers that stacked high to the ceiling of the Parts Department with all the smaller items that a car needs to keep running properly.

“In these drawers, Son,” Dad said, “you will find all the small parts you could ever need to put together one of those whole cars you see out there on the showroom and, while that’s not your job today, remember the idea. Anything worthwhile is put together with a lot of lesser things that together add up to something bigger than each of the parts themselves.”

“Wow,” I thought this morning. “Dad might as well have been talking about Greg Lucas’ new book. It’s in many ways like the parts manual I found that day in 1952 that both identified and  filled in the connections on how the various parts fit together for all the different purposes that cooperatively propel a good working automobile in the way it is intended to go. Wow,” I thought again. That’s very close to a description of what Greg Lucas has done here with his book on baseball.

Greg Lucas
Author

There is nothing less in Greg Lucas’ wonderful new baseball book. It is an item by item inventory of all the essential smaller areas of history that go into making up the whole roll of growth that has evolved around the heart and soul attraction so many of us for the game of baseball over the nearly two hundred years that make up the identifiable history of the American game.

Jacques Barzun, the great French scholar, once said, if you want to know America, know baseball. We say, if you want to know baseball, know what’s in “Baseball: It’s More Than Just a Game.” Do that much and you will be closer to the heart and soul of the game we all love than ever before. Greg Lucas hasn’t missed a beat here, but not in a know-it-all way. When you read Greg’s book, you are reminded too of how much we all have in store for us in the area of our need for continuing education about baseball.

From the early history of the game in the 19th century to the development of organized baseball, from the bare handed playing days to the evolving equipment we know today, from changes in the rules to the formation of both universal and variable distances that exist on each ball field, from the personalities and performances of players coming of age to the kinds of ballparks where they played their games, from the dead ball game of a more conservative America to the unsurprising power game that exploded with Babe Ruth and the culture of the “Roaring Twenties,” readers will find the baseball that Barzun suggested people needed to know if they care to know America – and it’s all here in the Greg Lucas book for a reasonable price through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other fine booksellers.

Get it. You won’t regret it. And you will use it forever.

Thanks, Greg Lucas, for writing baseball’s much needed version of the important automobile parts manual. Everything you’ve included is good-to-go information about the game – information that will never be out of date and always close at hand to all of us through your book.