PENN STATE Smithlin's nightmare extended

The slugger broke the same bone in each of his hands.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Zack Smithlin was finally back in Penn State's starting lineup, fully recovered from a broken right hand, when he swung at a pitch and felt a hauntingly familiar pain in his left hand.
"I just looked up at the sky and said, 'Oh, man. I can't believe this -- again!' " the speedy center-fielder recalled more than a year later. "I knew right then that I had done the same thing."
Smithlin broke the hook of the hamate bone -- a small curved bone located near the wrist and below the pinkie -- and effectively ended an already lost junior year. Just a few months earlier, Smithlin suffered the same injury to his right hand -- on the first pitch of the season.
"After I did the second one, I figured there had to be something wrong with the bones in my hands or my body or something," said Smithlin, who bounced back this season by hitting .343 with 22 RBIs and 23 stolen bases in his fifth year with the Nittany Lions.
Common injury
The injury is common among baseball players, especially power hitters. The ligaments of the fingers of hard swingers wrap around the tiny bone and snap it off. Ken Griffey Jr., Jose Canseco, Aaron Boone and Darin Erstad are among those who have had the injury.
"But every doctor said they had never seen anything like what happened to me," Smithlin said. "They never saw the same injury happen to both hands at different times."
Smithlin, from Fairlawn, N.J., and his parents researched treatment methods and found Dr. Lee Osterman, a highly regarded hand specialist in Philadelphia.
Osterman eased Smithlin's fears about something being wrong with his bones, and suggested that one cause could have been the slightly different swing he was using after adding 15 pounds of muscle to his 5-foot-10, 165-pound frame.
Smithlin had surgery to have the bone removed from the left hand, and concentrated on playing during the summer. He never doubted he'd be back on the field within a few weeks.
"Just knowing that I had a good doctor, and knowing he was a professional and that every guy who had the same surgery recovered made me feel confident," Smithlin said.
After the first injury, Smithlin opted to not have surgery. His hand was placed in a cast for about six weeks, and Smithlin stayed with the team. The switch-hitter and school's career stolen base leader served as a pinch-runner and was able to bunt from the right side of the plate.