Baseball the weird

 I don't know if it qualifies as an official thing, but there's something about baseball players that turns them into your average household doofus far more often than it should.

They are, theoretically, highly conditioned professional athletes. But sometimes they get hurt in ways not even Doofus Dan could manage.

Case in point: Atlanta Braves pitcher Chris Sale.

Who went on the DL this week because -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- he fractured his left rib cage. And not because he decided to moonlight as a NASCAR driver and Joey Logano or someone T-boned him. Nah, nothing like that.

Sale did it making a diving stop of a Juan Soto grounder in the ninth inning the other night and throwing him out to help the Bravos beat the Mets. Got up, dusted himself off, felt fine until his workout the next day, when he said something didn't feel right.

A fractured rib cage will do that to you. Which is the kind of injury you'd expect an 80-year-old diving for a ball would suffer, not a 36-year-old professional athlete.

But now Sale joins the pantheon of other nutso injuries, like Vince Coleman getting eaten by a tarp roller, and Rickey Henderson getting frostbite because he left an ice pack on his foot too long, and Tigers pitcher Joel Zumaya missing three starts because he injured his right wrist playing Guitar Hero.

Sale?

Heck, it wasn't even the first time he'd suffered a rib deal. In 2022 he missed the first three months of the season with a stress fracture of his right ribcage. And it's not like he introduced bizarre rib injuries to baseball.

No, that might have been Carlos Correa of the Astros, who in 2019 missed some time because of soreness that turned out to be a broken rib. And how'd he break it?

While getting a massage.

Baseball is weird, man. So weird.