Reporting from the Phillies camp in Spring Training 1970, and perhaps seeking something to talk about other than the standard training camp bromides, Ralph Bernstein of the Associated Press asked Phillies trainer Don Seger what concerned him the most in his line of work. Seger, who would be described by another reporter as a “chubby, soft-spoken man, whose pockets bulge with the tools of his trade— adhesive tape, forceps and ointments”, 1 rattled off a familiar list of musculoskeletal grievances: sore arms, hand and wrist injuries, and the hamstring gave him the most trouble. And of those, the hamstring stood out for its arbitrariness: While a sore arm might be prevented with proper care, the hamstring injury, per Seger, couldn’t be prevented. But despite the admission of his own powerlessness over a strip of muscle tissue, he couldn’t quite bring himself to fully surrender: “I do try to encourage men who have had a history of hamstring problems to do stretching exercises to at least prepare their hamstring a little bit for the task it is going to perform”.

In June 1977, the AP again ran a story about the Phillies and their thigh muscles. By that point a cryotherapy machine had been invented to speed along recovery of, among other things, the hamstring — and though no more than nine of them could be found in the entirety of the United States, the Phillies were able to get their latest hamstring victim, Greg Luzinski, into one. Don Seger, again confronting the trainer’s most hated enemy, felt that it helped Luzinski, who the AP referred to as the “husky slugger”, get back to game action more quickly. Sure enough, the machine’s work was so rapid that Luzinski was back in the lineup several days before the reporters spread the word about the miracle machine. A few days after his return, he was well enough to hit a game-winning homer against the Astros. The AP noted that Houston “discovered… that only Luzinski’s hamstring, not his bat, had been iced”.

Baseball fandom introduces one to a litany of medical complaints otherwise only familiar to the physician: thoracic outlet syndrome, ulnar nerve entrapment, epicondylitis. Still, one injury stands out amongst the sea of sprains, pulls, pinches and snaps: the hamstring injury. Only the Achilles tendon injury can match it for dreadful familiarity to the sports enthusiast (though the UCL tear and the surgery it brings about is making rapid gains), and while the hamstring lacks the Achilles’ mythological heft, it carries a unique honor of its own. It is perhaps the only injury to serve as its own metaphor: to suffer an injury to one of the three muscles that run from hip to knee is to be hamstrung in both a literal and literary sense.