Being tough and being stupid are not forever connected. It’s 162 games, you’re going to be sore a lot. No, that doesn’t mean everytime you have a little tightness, you need to sit out 5 games.

There’s a line between toughing it out when you’re really hurt, and just being soft. Believe it or not, some players ARE soft.

There’s quite a lot of gray area between pitching with a sore shoulder when your velocity is down 10 mph and sitting out 3 games with a bruise.

theres a reason why guys like wes welker will never back down from a slant pattern over the middle bc thats how they became the players they are today.

obviosly theres a difference if he would have knowingly run full speed into a brick wall to cut a 1st inning double into a single and suffered multiple head wounds.

side note, just a week before the injury, rowand told the phillies that the CF wall needed padding so something like that didnt happen, but apparently padding isnt something you can buy in the greater metropolitan area of philadelphia, so they never “fixed” it till after the fact.

Nobody said all sequential events are causal. Can we please stick to the arguments I’m actually making? If a child scrapes his knee in Thailand it’s probably not going to have any impact on my life. Not now, not ever. But if you remove Rowand’s link in the chain, are you willing to bet your life that absolutely nothing in the baseball world changes?

The Baby Ruth chain is far more valid then what you present. All Sox players knew about the “curse”, and It may well have had a tangible effect on their on-field performance. The Rowland connection is absurd.

And to be a lot more pedantic, not all sequential events are causal. If i flip one coin, then another, the result of the first flip in no was determines the second. If you can even suggest (beyond wild conjecture) any causal link then ill listen — but merely claiming all things to be related is simply a fallacy.