Carl Crawford was officially listed as "day to day" on Wednesday after sustaining an injury Tuesday night in an area that no man ever wants to get injured.
In case you missed it, here's the video.
Adding insult to injury, Crawford was tagged out on the play before he left the game. According to tampabay.com, he sustained a "testicular contusion." Sorry if you just got the chills.
"He's as good as can be expected," Rays manager Joe Maddon told the website. "For all us males, we understand how difficult that can be.''
Like most outfielders, Crawford doesn't wear a protective cup because it's not very often that he's in danger of getting hit. But if Crawford needs a shoulder to lean on as he recovers from the pain, he can call Red Sox third baseman Adrian Beltre.
As Red Sox fans have now seen on a regular basis, Beltre's a unique individual. He swings out of his shoes on pitches three feet outside, he hits 400-foot homers from one knee and he stops his momentum and stands straight up before throwing to first. And don't even think about touching his head.
But perhaps Beltre's strangest quirk is the fact that he doesn't wear a protective cup, despite the fact that his job requires him to stand between 85-110 feet away from major league batters who hit rockets at him.
For most of his life, Beltre got along just fine. That was until last August, when he took a shot off the bat of Alexei Ramirez in the ninth inning of a game against the White Sox. Unlike Crawford, however, Beltre stayed in the game, and he eventually scored the winning run in the 14th inning. It truly was as valiant and manly an effort that the game of baseball has ever seen.
That's not where Beltre's inspiring story began or ended, either. It began in the Dominican Republic, where he never wore a cup, even on the uneven playing fields. It continued in his early days as a professional baseball player, when he wore a cup in his earliest days because he was fined for not doing so. That didn't last long. It eventually led to his unfortunate incident last August, after which the Mariners told him he'd better start suiting up with a cup.
He did, at least for a couple of days. Then he stopped wearing it for the rest of the season. The man is simply not afraid.
"They say I'm crazy not to wear the cup, but I say, if the ball’s going to hit me there every 11 1/2 years, I’ll take my chances," Beltre told The Boston Globe during spring training.
Chances are, Crawford won't be adding a cup to his uniform any time soon. Speed is too essential to his game for him to be slowed down, and what happened on Tuesday was a freak accident.
Still, if he finds himself hesitant when he steps back on the field, he should have Beltre on speed dial.
