Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Feets Don't Fail Me

the latest on pujols’ hurtin’ heel from mlb.com and the post-dispatch. google turns up a homemade website about the injury, which docs call plantar fasciitis and the rest of us know as heel spurs.

now albert has something in common with joe dimaggio besides incredible stat lines. dimaggio also suffered from heel spurs, was crippled by them toward the end of his career. read about it in hemingway’s "the old man and the sea" or halberstam’s "summer of ’49."

per halberstam’s book, by the spring of 1949 dimaggio could barely walk, so painful was his condition. he sat out the entire first half of that year before his feet got fit, returned in time to swat 14 hr and knock in 67 runs as the yankees squeaked past the red sox by a game. it was casey stengel’s first season as yankee skipper — and the first of five consecutive world championships for the yanks.