It Hurts To Watch - version 2

This was starting to become a regular series around here, and then something happened. Could it be that I haven't been to the coast since the start of the year? That trip was what inspired me to start this series. While the series slowed down as the last posting was mid January, the love is still there. I will always think that the crashing of guys fighting for that small piece of real estate called home plate is the best play in baseball. You can have your double plays, and catches that end with a collision with the wall. I will keep my play at the plate.

In my opinion there is one great thing about baseball cards that showcase the play at the plate. On some of the cards such as the one above. Despite having his mask on, you can tell he knows this is going to get ugly. These collisions are so violent that there is always one of if not both of the players left hurting for awhile.This is the type of view that we as fans never get to see unless we take the time to look at our cards and take notice.

The reason for this violence is you have a brick wall in the catcher, and a running man looking to run through that wall. Sometimes the momentum is broken by a slide, and other times its unbroken with a forearm trying to break the ball loose. An interesting study would be to see which one does the most damage to the base-runner.

Looking at the card above, and the way Lemke is crumpled up. I'm going to go out on a limb, and say the method used by Lemke didn't work this time. Not only does he look out by the way Pagnozzi is holding up the ball. I'm going to say it's a safe bet that Lemke got the worst of this collision by a long ways.

Hopefully it won't take another month and a half before I do the next posting of this series. I do have a small pile of 10 cards waiting to be showcased for this series. I'm not good at math, but I believe that gives me just over three more postings before having to figure something out.