It’s been a while since I wrote about a New Thing I Learned here.

I always feel like when I hear something worth writing about I’ll know it.

And Saturday night I encountered one of those somethings.

I was watching the Mets game, of course, and Francisco Alvarez got hit by a pitch in his hand.

This is concerning for any player because you worry about broken bones, but with Alvarez it’s especially concerning because he missed the first month of the season with a broken hamate bone.

A.J. Pierzynski, a former major league catcher himself, was doing color commentary for the game and after they talked about Alvarez’s recent injury history, Pierzynski said confidently, “Well, I had that same surgery and I can guarantee you that impact didn’t break the hamate bone again.”

And what he said next was the amazing part.

Pierzynski continued: “Because they take out the bone.”

So I texted my friend Kevin, as I am wont to do in situations like these, to see if he’d ever heard of that. He was skeptical.

I had no reason to doubt Pierzynski, but I looked it up to confirm.

Sure enough, it sounds like in athletes they just remove the bone.

I’m not the greatest at identifying muscles and bones and such in the body. The best I can understand about the hamate is it’s on the outer end of the hand (near the pinky), but I can’t quite identify which exact protuberance it is.

There’s no bone there that to me seems like, if it was removed, the rest of the hand wouldn’t just fall apart. (Or maybe it’s replaced with a pin? So that can’t break but everything else stays in place? Did I just invent a groundbreaking procedure? I am pretty much a surgeon, I guess.)

But regardless, it’s pretty fascinating.

If I wasn’t so squeamish I might enjoy learning more medically-oriented things.

For now, I’ll stick with interesting, baseball-specific surgeries that involve removing bones where I don’t have to look at anything gross.