“It’s probably hard to get all that right.

Nathan, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Illinois. “I think there are circumstances where the batter can get to the bag quicker by diving with arms outstretched provided he times it perfectly and doesn’t hit the ground,” says Alan M. But, let’s say it is possible that sliding head first can be a few milliseconds faster. This is a point of contention even among physicists because there are so many variables involves. Two, it’s possible that sliding head first is faster. I should say up front it would not be AS compelling a list as the head-first one, but one thing you hear all the time from players is, “Hey, people get hurt sliding, people get hurt playing baseball, you can’t worry about that.” You could put together a pretty compelling list of people who have been hurt sliding feet first too. Why? Why do these people insist on sliding head first? I would say there are four basic reasons. “I’ll keep sliding headfirst,” he immediately said. Ben Zobrist dislocated his thumb sliding head first - this was a decade after his was pulled from a minor league game for doing so. But there’s something deep inside today’s ballplayer that makes him want to slide head first no matter how illogical or pointless it might be. You would think that the way injuries have wrecked the brilliant careers of Hamilton and Zimmerman alone would be enough to get people to stop doing it. Four years later, during spring training in 1981, Rookie of the Year Joe Charboneau busted up HIS back sliding head first and his career more or less ended.

Rick Manning, a childhood hero, busted up his back sliding head first in 1977, and he was never again the same player. The headfirst slide basically wrecked my childhood. Just cherry picking a few famous ones: Lenny Dykstra fractured his hand sliding head first in 1992. This nonsense goes back much further than that. Here is a New York Times story from 2003 that listed off big name players who were hurt sliding head first - Derek Jeter dislocated his shoulder, Kenny Lofton separates his shoulder, Manny Ramirez fractured his finger. Here is an MLB.com story from 2011 that listed off big name players who were hurt sliding head first - Josh Hamilton (this is a different one), Rafael Furcal, Yunel Escobar and Ryan Zimmerman (this is a different one too).

How far back does this nonsense go? Well, h ere is a Fangraphs story from 2015 that listed off names of big name players who were hurt sliding head first - Bryce Harper, Josh Hamilton, Nolan Arenado, David Wright, Ian Kinsler, Ben Zobrist, Dustin Pedroia and so on. We’ve known for a long, long time that the headfirst dive in baseball is just plain dumb and dangerous … maybe this Trout injury is the thing to begin its banishment from the game. But the truth is we’ve been talking about this forever. There is a temptation anytime someone gets hurt, particularly on a routine play, to overreact.

Sliding Headfirst by Kristin Lee