FROM FLUKES TO WAKES:

The Weird, Wacky World Of Baseball Injuries (Thomas Boswell, May 19, 2004, Washington Post)

Five-time batting champion Wade Boggs missed a week when he lost his balance putting on his cowboy boots and fell into a couch. Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons fell asleep in a rocking chair while talking to Rogers Hornsby and Bill Terry. While rocking as he snoozed, the 217-game winner crunched his pitching fingers under the chair. His month-long injury may have cost the '27 Giants a pennant. And Lefty Gomez, while knocking dirt from his spikes, smashed his ankle instead and was carried off the field.

So Sammy Sosa shouldn't feel too bad. Fluke injuries are nothing to sneeze at, especially in baseball, where the ridiculously improbable injury seems the rule, not the exception. Nonetheless, when Sosa sneezed twice while bending over in the Cubs clubhouse Sunday, sending his back into spasms and putting himself out of the lineup, he earned a spot on the all-time list. [...]

Sosa now joins the great tradition of comic "disabled" Cubs outfielders, which is led by Jose Cardenal, who couldn't play on Opening Day in 1974 because he said he slept wrong and his eyelid was stuck shut. Two seasons earlier, Cardenal had told manager Whitey Lockman he couldn't play because crickets in his hotel room kept him up all night.

At least Sosa has witnesses who can attest to his story. Not so for Padres southpaw David Wells, who lost Sunday, then cut his right wrist and left palm that same evening in a "home accident."

"It was not a fight," said General Manager Kevin Towers, perhaps aware that Wells once broke his pitching hand in a street fight outside a bar after his mother's wake -- something about a comment concerning her days riding with the Hells Angels.