All Hail Jordany Valdespin

Try not to think about these

You can in fact successfully find what you're looking for if you Google "Jordany Valdespin hit in nuts".

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, be assured that there will be no more cringe-inducing moment in professional sports this year than the one created by the intersection of a 94 MPH Justin Verlander fastball and the font of future Valdespins. Valdespin didn't stand a chance. He went down like he'd been shot. Which, to a certain extent, he had.

There's always a certain awkward dance around the nut shot in sports. It happens all the damn time but the announcer has not yet been hired who will say "he just took a two-hopper off his two hoppers", not since Dizzy Dean got in trouble for describing a young couple in the stands at Sportsman's Park in slightly too colloquial terms. In hockey, they say "lower body injury". In football, it's "abdomen". In baseball, it's a "hard shot to the stomach". Decorum must be preserved, and if there's something incongruous about something as snortingly testosterone-laden as sports pretending that actual testicles don't exist, well, you haven't been paying attention.

And that's one of the reasons I like young Mr. Valdespin. When asked where he got hit, he said, and I quote, "The dick". No mincing words, no euphemisms. He laid it out there, so to speak, and he owned it. And then he admitted that he didn't wear a cup, which meant that what he'd gone through - no, what he'd survived - was that much more impressive and terrifying. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, "Anything hits my dick that hard, I'm going to spot-weld to it". Yet Mr. Valdespin went into battle with just a few layers of cloth protecting his most prized possessions, and without the sort of agility bonus that might have mitigated his woeful THAC0, and still he lived.

So hats off and cups on to you, Jordany Valdespin. You've livened up a humdrum spring training with the sort of daring that the stars of Jackass couldn't expect to survive, and you did it with enough savoir faire to pull off the press conference line of the spring (NSCW edition). Sportsodoxy will be rooting for you, sir. 

And advising you, next time, to get the hell out of the way.