Cup Check

You know, I thought that every major league player wore a protective cup just as a matter of course.  Turns out I was wrong.

Adrian Beltre went on the DL today with severely bruised testicles after a one-hop grounder to third off the bat of the White Sox Alexi Ramirez caught him where his cup should have been. He may need surgery due to testicular bleeding.

Apparently, Beltre wasn’t wearing a cup because he finds them uncomfortable to wear.  I wonder how comfortable it felt getting hit flush in the stones.

In Jim Bouton’s classic Ball Four, he writes about how one of his minor league teammates used to go around conducting “cup checks” on unsuspecting teammates.  In other words, he would sneak up on his victim unawares while the latter was sitting on the bench and punch him hard in the groin.  Needless to say, it taught the victim to have his cup on any time he was out on or near the field of play.

Perhaps this is a tradition, as juvenile and sadistic as it was, that did in fact serve some greater purpose.  If one of Beltre’s minor league teammates had done the same, perhaps Beltre wouldn’t now be on the DL and possibly facing the knife because he was too dumb to wear a cup.

Another thing this incident reminds us is that you don’t necessarily need to be a rocket scientist to be a major league ballplayer.  Also mentioned in Ball Four is the age-old baseball expression “Stop thinking: you’re hurting the team!”  The point of this adage was that a ballplayer can over-think out on the field instead of just letting instinct, honed by years and years of practice and play, take over.

One thing is for certain.  If they hold a vote for “Dumbest Player of the Year,” Adrian Beltre’s got my vote.