Balls To The Wall

When I played baseball in high school, there was one guy on our team, Joey, who refused to wear a cup. Just wouldn’t do it. Most of the time, this was fine, because Joey was a huge guy, a football player who would either get his body in front the ball to knock it down or just field the ball from the side. And it worked for a while.

But there was one big problem with this. We played on a really crappy, poorly maintained field at our high school. I played third base for a few years there and that was the worst spot on the field. The ball would be coming at you, looking like a true hop, and then hit a rock and spin in another direction. I took baseballs off the face, the body, the arms, and even caught a few in the cup.

This was the year I caught the entire season (a miserable experience in a lot of ways). The reason I acquiesced to catching was two-fold. One, it guaranteed me that I’d play every inning of every game no matter how poorly we did because, well, we really didn’t have another catcher. And two, Joey was a third baseman and he could hit for power, something I never developed.

So one game at home, Joey was playing third. A hot shot was hit to third base and Joey bent down to grab it. The ball hit a rock and bounced right into his groin. Mind you, no one actually knew he didn’t wear a cup, but the ball hits the junk area and it hurts. But we saw him peel over and hit the ground. We ran out to check on him and the coach asked him what was wrong.

That’s when we found out that he didn’t wear a cup. I’m paraphrasing, but in the team meeting afterwards, the coach said that no matter who it was, if anybody played without a cup again, they would sit and that no one on the team plays “balls to the wall”.

The new rule was that the coach could do what’s called a “cup check”, which was an awful exercise where he would randomly walk up to a player and swat him in the nuts with a bat. If the player was wearing a cup, this was only a flinch. If a guy wasn’t, he probably was in enough pain he couldn’t play anyways. The coach actually sat two guys that season (the starting left side of the infield, actually) who showed up to a game sans cup. And we all learned the lesson about wearing our cups.

The reason I tell this story was because I was reading through Peter Abraham’s blog and saw this: “It hurts just to write this. But Seattle 3B Adrian Beltre could be done for the season after taking a bad-hop grounder in the groin last night. It caused tearing in one of his testicles along with internal bleeding and he could require surgery. Beltre does not use a cup.”

Now it’s possible to hurt your balls with a cup on (Carlton Fisk famously did when his protective cup broke and ruptured his testicle). But the odds are significantly lower.

Mariners Blog for The Seattle Times writes that Adrian Beltre was a gamer and “bravely” stayed in the game, even scoring the winning run. I think Beltre’s self description is much more accurate: “I don't know about brave. Maybe stupid.''

Yes, very, very stupid. Hopefully this will teach people the lesson: wear a freaking cup when you’re playing baseball or else you’ll tear your testicle.