Lansford Isn’t the First, and Won’t Be the Last

What Carney Lansford, Oakland’s third baseman, does to himself playing in a snowmobile is a sad state of affairs, but not an upset.

Mr. Lansford is an excellent baseball player--good hit, good field, good attitude. The fact he busts up his knee and his shoulder not engaged in baseball, but in a sport unrelated to his line of work, is pretty much the way it has been going for as long as we recall.

A recognized authority on off-season injuries, we still remember the headline in a Baltimore newspaper: “UNITAS SURGERY SUCCESS--IN A CAST SIX WEEKS.”

It is only spring, so you know this celebrated passer has not fallen to a defensive end. He is the victim of that dangerous contact sport, paddle tennis.

If a snowmobile does in Lansford, it is a pair of skis that produces the most notable winter sports accident befalling one whose line isn’t winter sports.

Jim Lonborg, a wonderful right-handed pitcher, has just won 22 games for Boston. He wins the Cy Young award. He starts three games in the World Series against St. Louis.

Now departing for California’s High Sierra, he zooms down the mountain on his skis and racks up his knee so severely he is able to win but six games the following season and is soon out of baseball.

We happen to know Jim, who is a very special guy, a graduate of Stanford, which doesn’t make him a special guy, but he is a fine fellow nonetheless.

“Do you regret having gone skiing?” we asked him, not long after the injury.

“Not in the least,” he answered. “When there is so much to do in life, you can’t sit around like a zombie and have meals sent into your room. You have to get out and enjoy yourself. Besides, of every 100 people who ski, only four suffer major injuries. The odds were in my favor.”

Lonborg would enter dental school and earn his degree. And he has been practicing for years now in a small town near Boston.

At this moment, statistics aren’t available on the number of injuries per 100 snowmobile runs, but more often than not, basketball is the game that knocks off athletes who aren’t basketball players.

Countless injuries have been recorded, most memorable of which is that happening to a stickout relief pitcher for Atlanta, Cecil Upshaw, who is walking down a San Diego street with his colleagues, discussing not the sinker or the slider, but the stuff shot.

One guy says he could defend Upshaw against the stuff. Upshaw says no way. He begins an imaginary dribble, up he goes--and catches his finger on a spike supporting an overhanging sidewalk awning. He rips the finger so grotesquely that delicate surgery is needed to save it. When John Hadl is a very important quarterback, he fractures his skull falling off a horse. Laffit Pincay, master astride a horse, tries harness racing one night. His pacer flips. Medical report on Pincay: broken collarbone, bruised hip and legs. He is out of action a month.

Relaxing outside his motel at Indianapolis, where he has gone to qualify for the 500, Al Unser is showing the gang how to “wheel” a motorcycle, which is to say, stand it on its rear wheel.

Al is wheeled into an ambulance with a broken leg.

Buzzie Bavasi, then a baseball general manager, gets very angry at ABC when it introduces “The Superstars,” a series in which famous athletes compete in sports other than their own. Johnny Bench was bowling, Joe Frazier was swimming, Jean-Claude Killy was playing table tennis.

“If you are putting on that show for our benefit,” Buzzie told ABC, “forget it. Our guys have found enough ways away from the park to put themselves on crutches.”

Baseball pays such immense wages today that many contracts contain clauses forbidding outside activity. Guys aren’t permitted to ski--on snow or water. They can’t ride horses, fly private planes, scuba dive, even hunt. They can’t play tennis, racquetball and especially basketball.

When a baseball player got hurt falling off a ladder, from which he was washing windows, Al Rosen, president of the San Francisco Giants, got mad.

“Why are rich people washing windows?” he asked.

It was a logical question. The answer: Because the windows are there.