You'd think pitchers (the guys who stand alone on the center of the baseball diamond with 30,000 eyes plastered on them for up to three hours on a given afternoon) would be used to handling pressure and far better than the average human at remaining calm, cool, and collected. But as AJ Burnett showed us this weekend, and Carlos Zambrano a dozen times before him, pitchers handle frustration the same way as the rest of us; by trying to break things.
After giving up three runs including a homer in the second inning of Saturday's start against the Rays, Burnett bulldozed into the clubhouse and smashed his hands, the primary tools of a pitcher, into a pair of swinging doors. Burnett cut both hands on the plastic containers affixed to the doors for team lineup cards and other paperwork.
"Out of all the doors, I picked the ones with the plexiglass," Burnett said. "I'm not the first player to snap. It's something I'll have to learn from."
Not only did Burnett have another rough outing and hurt himself in a freak injury, but he told Yankee trainers that he had hurt himself through a completely different freak injury, falling on stairs, which the media originally reported.
According to Fanhouse, the good news for Burnett is that he was able to use both hands effectively while text messaging after the game. So at least his ability to BBM his buddies wasn't affected.
