A few months ago, my younger kid (accidentally?) dropped a lamp on my big toe. It was pretty awful in the moment because no one else was around, so it was pretty much like, “Yeah, you still gotta keep this mischievous rascal from dying for hours even though your toe looks like a chocolate-dipped strawberry now.” It happened long enough ago that I didn’t even remember it, until for whatever reason, it started feeling like someone dropped a lamp on it again over the last few days. I had a pretty up-and-about day yesterday with a bunch of in-person work meetings at various places and a bunch of errands, and it was… annoying. It didn’t impede me from walking or anything, it just made everything more unpleasant than it would’ve been without it.
Meanwhile, something that’s going to be fresh in our minds for a while is the whole thing where Sean Murphy apparently played through a debilitating hip problem for multiple years. Now, Sean Murphy’s hip problem is way worse than my toe. It doesn’t even qualify for this question, since it was bad enough that he eventually needed surgical intervention. But, it’s where my mind went.
Instead, I’ll ask this: what’s the most annoying injury that players can and would play through — one that makes everything more annoying, without impacting performance? Nothing that you would react to by saying, “Uh, why are you playing through that, Bobson Dugnutt? You should’ve told the team and taken an Injured List stint.” Instead, something like, “Yeah, that sucks, but no one’s catching an IL stint for that.”
