Rant #1,495: Hit By Pitch

The Yankees remain in first place, so I am a happy guy.

They came back again last night and won their game, and all is well in the Bronx, at least for the time being.

The Eastern Division is so tight that this really is a five-team horse race with only a few weeks to go in the regular season.

Whatever happens this season, there will be many highlights that I will remember.

But one of those highlights is actually a low-light, a wakeup call that whenever you compete in sports, the chance of injury is always there.

Brian Mitchell, the Yankees' rookie pitcher, was making a start on Monday against the visiting Twins at Yankee Stadium.

He looked pretty good early on, but then tragedy struck.

Former Yankee Eduardo Nunez was at the plate, and hit a scorching line drive through the pitcher's mound.

The problem was that Mitchell was in the way, and the ball hit him in the face.

The ball was hit so hard that it careened off Mitchell's face into centerfield for a hit.

Mitchell was on the ground, and was in obvious pain.

As he was attended to, you saw that blood was coming from his face, and it was clear that he was in some major distress.

Happily for him, the bill of his cap might have saved him from some worse injury.

The ball actually hit the bill first, and then hit him in the nose.

He suffered a nose fracture and a concussion, and will be out of action for perhaps a week or so, or perhaps a little more.

And that is it.

Many years ago, in the late 1950s, Yankees batter Gil McDougald hit a similar scorching line drive through the box, and it hit Indians pitcher Herb Score squarely in the eye.

Although Score did make it back, he was never the same pitcher, and for that matter, McDougald was never the same hitter, so that incident pretty much ended each player's career.

There have been more recent incidents, such as when pitcher Brandon McCarthy was struck squarely in the skull by a hit ball a few years ago.

He needed several brain surgeries, as the pull cracked open his skull. He has come back to pitch, but is currently on the disabled list with an arm ailment.

These things do happen. But when they happen, the cry is that something more needs to be done to protect the pitcher. There are those who believe that pitchers should wear batting helmets, but while that might have helped McCarthy, I don't know how much it would have helped Score or Mitchell.

There is actually a design out there which has been pretty much rejected for aesthetic reasons of a cap that kind of looks like a hunter's cap. It protrudes all around, is unsightly, and nobody is currently wearing the cap in the major leagues.

What do you do about the safety of a pitcher, especially during these days when pitchers regularly throw 90-plus miles an hour and often their pitches are hit back to them at over 100 miles per hour?

You can't put up a fence in front of the piitcher, like they use in batting practice. That would harm the integrity of the game.

The only way to make things better for pitchers is to redesign their caps, but right now, other than the cap I talked about earlier, it isn't happening just yet.

Someday, a cap will be designed that is light, good looking, and does the job.

But a cap like this would not necessarily have helped Mitchell, because he basically got hit in the face.

You can't have a cap with a face guard, because that would take away from the line of vision of the pitcher.

So what do you do?

Right now, not much.

Athletes are prone to injury, and he suffered an injury, yes, an unfortunate one, but it goes down as an injury.

He will survive. Others who got hit survived.

Honestly, on this level, I really don't know what you can do.

It is, unfortunately, part of the game.