In place for protection from batted balls, the chest-high fence in front of baseball dugouts is perfect to lean of if you’re an armpit, but it doesn’t protect from armpits up, which is why you see players scatter like a jailbreak when the occasional foul ball stinger comes shooting through there, looking for an target.

But sometimes, the fence doesn’t serve its purpose, which is to protect from armpits down. You’d think it would. That’s why it’s there. But …

Neg.

Such is life, funny dog that she is.

There are cutouts on each end for players and coaches to walk into and out of the dugout. They are athletes, but you can’t expect them to vault a fence dozens of times a game, just to get to their water or glove or bathroom or a place to sit, then back onto the field.

And it was through one of those openings that an unsuspecting player was targeted this past week at the Conference USA 2025 Baseball Championship in Lynchburg, Va.

Thank goodness it wasn’t a player from Louisiana Tech, the defending regular-season champs but the fifth-seed in the 2025 tournament and the fourth team dismissed in the eight-team tournament. Against one win in Lynchburg, they lost for the second and final time on Friday, the anniversary of the end of Bonnie and Clyde in 1934 just down the road from Ruston in Gibsland so … things could have been worse.

Regardless, this tale from the dugout, while not as historically significant, is a sad and timeless one.

A player was minding his own business in the first-base dugout when a teammate, a right-handed batter, swung late on a pitch and lasered the foul ball through his dugout and, most unintentionally, into his teammate, who was met by the stitched orb of a missile right below the equator — if you know what I mean and I think you do.

If you buckled a bit when you read that, you are a guy. You’ve been there. It is not a good place to be. It’s not a good place to visit or even to contemplate. But … these things happen.

The player immediately hit the dugout floor, as anyone but Superman would have. Even Superman would probably have had to take a leotarded knee in this, the most delicate of situations.

A baseball to the nether regions is kryptonite for us all.

It took a minute — an agonizing, long, torturous trial — but the young man was able to keep playing, although with his senses now heightened in every way imaginable, and his young knees somewhat weak. It took a methodical and purposeful, slow, laborious rise to the bent position, followed by an eventual seat on the bench, some cautious re-arranging, and he was as ready to go as any male could be in such a situation.

Hey, it was championship baseball. All hands and all body parts, even sore ones, on deck.

Good for the team in that he didn’t have to play in the field since he was the designated hitter. He will tell you from that bitter experience, being the designated hitter is much better than being the designated hittee.

I had never seen that before. Well, I HAD seen it before, up close and personal. And such an incident is not unusual in athletics, body parts and balls flying this way and that. But to thread the needle with a foul ball through the dugout door and right into the most private of parts, that was a new one on me. And a painful one on the innocent, most unsuspecting player.

There are all kinds of ballpark hurts, of course. Physical ones hardly ever last. But the emotional ones — the loss to a rival, losing The Big Game, the end of a season — those stay with you a while.

Those are the most painful cuts of all. Those hit you where it really hurts. 

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu