The Legend of the Severed Quad

Unless you’ve been away on holiday on that crazy Earth-like planet that scientists just discovered (you know – the one located near red dwarf star Gilese 581), you’ve probably heard the Josh Hamilton story by now: Former #1 overall pick gets into huge trouble with drug addiction and then improbably resurfaces in the Major Leagues this year only to club five homers in his first 38 at-bats in The Show.

Pretty good story.

Here’s a fascinating little offshoot of it that you might not know:

Hamilton has a torn quadriceps muscle in his left leg, and when he flexes his left leg, a sizable lump surfaces above the knee. As he recently explained to the Dayton Daily News,

"They can't do anything about it, but it doesn't bother me. It just detached and kind of rolled up."

Something about this image strikes us as wonderfully vivid, terribly gruesome and slightly fascinating, all at the same time. We never really realized that a muscle could just roll up like that.

Does this mean that we don’t actually need our quad muscles? To think how much time we’ve spent in our lives doing that one stretch where you have to pull back your one leg and then focus on one area of the ground so that you don’t fall over while standing on your other leg.

Could we skip this stretch altogether for the rest of eternity and just have our quad muscles snipped? And if so, can we have Carl Spackler, the greenskeeper from Caddyshack, perform the surgical procedure?

(As you may recall, Carl was fully prepared to sever Judge Smails’ hamstring with a knife. Apparently, as it turns out, he would have been doing the Judge something of a favor. The thing would have just rolled up and made a lump and then he wouldn’t really have to worry about it anymore.)

For the record, we're not actually advising the snipping of various muscles in the upper leg region as a means of emulating Josh Hamilton, but we’d be lying if we said this whole thing hadn’t made us just a tad bit curious.

Can somebody raise Geoff Huish, the testicle-snipping rugby fan, on the tele? Given his track record, he’d probably be up for giving it a go.

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As if Dayton Daily News writer Hal McCoy hadn’t given us enough of a gift with the Hamilton quad revelation, in the very same article he revealed that Ken Griffey, Jr. has recently missed time with a case of diverticulitis.

Yet somehow, he does not take any measures whatsoever to explain what in the dickens diverticulitis is.

Are we supposed to have heard of that illness? Our spell check sure as shit hasn’t heard of it.

Does anybody know? Nobody? Fine – we’ll look it up. Hang on…

[Pause for Internet search]

Thanks for waiting. Dictionary.com has just provided us with two definitions, and we’d be lying if we said we didn’t absolutely love them both. The first:

diverticulitis
Noun. Inflammation of one or more diverticula, characterized by abdominal pain, fever, and changes in bowel movements.

Changes in bowel movements – sounds uncomfortable. Does this mean that your bowel movements morph into different entities? Like, are you suddenly crapping out snakes, or tiny little lemmings that yelp in delight as they splash down into the lukewarm toilet water?

Umm... perhaps we should just move on to the second definition:

diverticulitis
Noun. Inflammation of a diverticulum or of diverticula in the intestinal tract, causing fecal stagnation and pain.

Bless you, dictionary.com. Bless your sweet heart. Thanks to you we now have been exposed to the term “fecal stagnation.” Fantastic.

Not that this really clears anything up. I mean, if you requested a chalkboard diagram depicting exactly what diverticulitis is, we’d probably just draw you a picture of some dude taking a really uncomfortable dump.

And then we’d draw a Reds hat on top of his head and call him Ken Griffey, Jr.

By the way, for those of you wondering what a “diverticula” is, it’s “a blind, tubular sac or process branching off from a canal or cavity, esp. an abnormal, saclike herniation of the mucosal layer through the muscular wall of the colon.”

This is just the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t it? Did you ever imagine you’d get “tubular sac,” “saclike herniation” and “mucosal layer” in the same sentence?

You gotta love baseball season.