Catching A Baseball With Your Face

Statistics are an important part of baseball. Things like hits and pitches, stolen bases, how the runner got out, those are all things that are recorded by a statistician. When it comes to a players individual statistics or batting average, those things are very important to know and keep track of.

Keeping track of those things used to be my job; stat girl for the baseball team.

I used to keep track of which base each boy went to, who caught the ball that was hit, how many balls were thrown before the home run was hit. Allllllll that good stuff. But that's not really the good stuff, you wanna hear the good stuff?!!

Errr in this case, for this boy, bad stuff....
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I'm sitting there on the bench in the dugout, watching the boy from our team at bat, keeping track of how many pitches have been thrown to him. He had to have had only one or two already, and the next one is just so fast, I barely had time to look up! And I just saw something fly by, and then the boy, crouching over holding his face....

Oh my god his face is broken. That's all I could think, do you know how hard baseballs are? And how fast high school boys can through? Pretty freakin fast. How much pain was he in!? I was expecting lots of blood.

I'm sitting there, looking up, watching and waiting for the crowd of boys to separate in the dugout, then I finally see the boy, and he has, a baseball under his cheek. I mean, that's what it looks like. Like his face is that swollen, it looks as if someone shoved a baseball in his mouth up against his cheek. It was huge. Huge! Huuuuuuuge! I cant say that word enough to explain how huge and puffy swollen his cheek was.

And I saw it happen. Kind of. I didn't actually see the baseball hitting his cheek but still. Craaaaazy right. Poor guy! No Golden Glove. His cheek stayed purple after that, for a while, but not nearly as huge as it was that day in the dugout. I really cant explain what it looked like. Put your whole hand on one side of your face and imagine all that just being 5 times puffier. Imagine puffing up your cheeks but times 100.



Someone can say they've been hit in the face with a baseball before.