Yeah, this guy is smiling now…wait until a Joe Hickey pitching wedge shot comes violently careening towards him from one hole over…
Tampa Bay Devil Rays‘ pitching coach Jim Hickey, a name well-known among baseball fans around the globe, apparently needs to shy away from the links. Hickey was playing golf Tuesday when he managed to make Spaulding from Caddyshack look like Ben Hogan on the links. Hickey apparently managed to scull a pitching wedge shot off of a cart-path curb, which then propelled the golf ball back directly into his eye, leaving the hurling tutor with eleven stitches.
Now I’m not sure what the worst part of this whole debacle is. Maybe it’s that the Devil Rays, a team with a mildly-bloated 5.68 team ERA (good for dead last in MLB this season), lost their pitching coach, which could conceivably lead to the first time in MLB history a team finishes with 4 of its 5 starters ERAs in double-digits. I’ll give Scott Kazmir the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe the worst part about this is that the odds of having a ball line back in anyone’s face on a golf shot have to be about on par with the odds that Rick Astley makes a stunning musical comeback in the 2nd decade of this millenium.
Actually, I think the worst part of this whole story is that Hickey managed to scull a pitching wedge into a liner that could actually come back and hit him in the face. Seriously dude, sculling a pitching wedge, one of the most lofted clubs in the bag? I can’t even think of a parallel in baseball. Maybe if you choked up on the bat and swung at a fastball straight downward to hit a ground ball and ended up popping out somehow. But even that doesn’t compare to Hickey’s hack job on the links.
Note to Devil Rays’ pitchers: when Hickey gets back, if he’s on the mound throwing some pitches to a batter, make sure he’s wearing a catcher’s mask. I’d say there’s a decent chance the baseball might come zooming in for his eye.
-NEIL
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Matt // Jun 21, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Skull.
2 Neil // Jun 21, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Maybe if you lived up to your ‘editor’ responsibilities on the site, we wouldn’t have those types of typos, Gred Oden.
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