Columnist: Josh Hamilton lacks mental toughness

It's science.

 

I worded that very poorly. Recall that in my initial post, I acknowledged that there certainly are players who lack heart to perform day-in and day-out.

What I should have written in the subsequent post was that the impulse is to assume it must be a character issue, when indeed it could be a biological issue. But the tendency of some seems to be to assume character as the default.

 

I can't tell if you're being serious.

This year alone, we have had a prolonged slump and some soul-searching comments that turn out to be related to "quitting tobacco"; and now we have a sinus infection, which might be true and serious and might be, as anyone who has seen Ferris Bueller knows, a very good and somewhat non-verifiable excuse. And that's after the bar episode over the winter. This is all just in the last nine months.

It is curious.

 

Note also that an addict can't just take a 'couple tablets.'

 

Because when you make it a character issue, it becomes easier to distill it (or similar stories) into heroes and villains, the building blocks of great sportswriting.

 

Well, he's about to become a free agent and it seems like it's a foregone conclusion that he won't be back. Maybe that's the bigger issue with his teammates.

 

There might be more derision involved as there's a fair chance his sinus tissues are cooked from years of cocaine abuse.

 

Reminds me a lot of a guy named Mickey Mantle.

 

The baseball-football comparison is stupid, too. Big difference between playing through something for one day when you have the next six days to attend to it and playing through something when you rarely get a day off for six months. If a baseball player tried to play through everything, he'd likely end up missing significant portions of the season because his body got run down by never taking care of it. That's especially heightened for someone like Hamilton.

And I don't want to hear about Cal Ripken; he was a freak of nature.

 

How about Lou Gehrig?

 

I remember being absolutely pummeled for suggesting on the Jay Cutler thread a couple years ago that sports writers should independently check out the assessments they get on his knee injury and at least retain a healthy dose of skepticism about team injury releases.

 

Would it have killed the columnist to have at least tried to speak to Hamilton before writing this?

Or, maybe he could have gotten a quote -- maybe even an anonymous one -- from a teammate sharing his view.

As it is, his opinion is completely uninformed and speculative. It's worthless.