Back cover of today’s Daily News:

Clearly Bautista was angered by the inside pitches last night. But did that make him more likely to hit two home runs? I don’t know. Seems to me like he kind of just hits a lot of home runs.

And that, actually, is way weirder than being angered into hitting home runs. Jose Bautista. Who saw that one coming?

I’m a bit under the weather today and I can’t really muster up the strength to opine one way or the other about Roger Clemens’ indictment.

On one hand, like a lot of baseball fans, I’m pretty sick of all the steroids sanctimony and just wish the whole thing would go away.

On the other, screw Roger Clemens for beaning Mike Piazza then throwing a shard of bat at him. Plus he pretty clearly committed perjury and all, and that’s a crime.

Maybe something entertaining will come of all this. Like more Jose Canseco fashion choices. That’s what I’m pulling for.

Despite a headache, a doctor’s recommendation that he sit out and a bump on his head so large that he had to wear one of Babe Ruth’s larger caps, Gehrig played the next day against the Washington Senators to continue his streak at 1,415 games. “A little thing like that can’t stop us Dutchmen,” Gehrig told a reporter, according to Jonathan Eig’s definitive biography of Gehrig, “Luckiest Man.”

In 1924, during a postgame brawl with the Detroit Tigers, Gehrig swung at Ty Cobb and fell, hit his head on concrete, and was briefly knocked out. While playing first base against the Tigers in September 1930, Gehrig was hit in the face and knocked unconscious by a ground ball. He was knocked out again by an oncoming runner in 1935.

Those are the four incidents in which Gehrig’s being knocked unconscious was notable enough to be reported in newspapers. He most likely sustained other concussions that were never noticed or considered meaningful — for example, when he was hit in the head with a pitch during a 1933 game against Washington but continued playing — either in baseball or while serving as a halfback for Commerce High School in New York and later Columbia University.

– Alan Schwarz, New York Times.

Amazing, absolute must-read article from Schwarz investigating the long-term effects of head injuries in sports and how repeated brain trauma can mimic ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which Gehrig himself actually might not have even had.

The article freaks the crap out of me for a number of reasons, but the main thing that matters is how we tend to romanticize players like Gehrig — guys who played every day until they were no longer physically capable — and discount the possibility that they would have enjoyed longer, more productive careers if doctors knew then what we all know now.

Athletes tend to be tough guys. They want to play. And yet when they actually yield to the advice of their doctors and trainers — or better yet, their own bodies — and wait out injuries, people label them ‘soft’ and question their desire. That’s awful.

The physical toll that professional sports put on an athlete’s body is remarkable. It’s not like going to the gym or playing rec-league flag football like we do. I wrote about this at length last year: We need to stop pretending we understand other people’s pain.

Also — on a completely unrelated note — it turns out Gehrig is buried about 500 yards from Babe Ruth, in an adjacent cemetery. That strikes me as amazingly poetic, though I guess it stands to reason that a lot of Yankees would retire to the same general area. Both sites are walking distance from my house. I checked out Ruth’s resting spot not too long ago; I should probably visit Gehrig’s too.

The Yankees earned the nickname “The Bronx Zoo” with their brawling teams of the late seventies. But in 1990, outfielder Mel Hall gave the term a new twist.

“That was the year he was bringing exotic animals into the clubhouse—a cheetah or a panther,” recalled pitcher Dave LaPoint, who went 7-10 that season. “It’s weird when you come into the clubhouse and they say, ‘Don’t go into that room.’ “

“I think it was a tiger,” said Buck Showalter, then a young coach with the team.

– Sophia Hollander, Wall Street Journal.

Awesome read from Hollander about a very, very strange season for the Yankees.

I remember a lot of the details from that season. Not the tigers-in-the-clubhouse thing, but Pascual Perez showing up to camp late in an absurdly long stretch limo, Andy Hawkins’ 4-0 loss in a no-hitter, the manager firings, George Steinbrenner’s suspension and all that.

I was nine so I didn’t realize how weird it all was. When you’re young, you don’t have much perspective on strange events because you don’t have a big enough sample size of non-strange events for comparison. That’s pretty much how middle schools get away with it, I think. There was a small zoo in the basement of my middle school, and I never thought it was odd until I went back and subbed there and they were making plans to get rid of the alligator.

Anyway the big thing I remember about the Yankees in 1990 is that they sucked, and they had kinda sucked for a while. When I was coming into consciousness as a baseball fan, it seemed like the Mets were competitive every year and the Yankees were mostly an afterthought or a punchline.

And again, at the time I had no idea how strange it was.

Seems like things are going well for ol’ Harvey the alligator, FWIW.

(Apropos of nothing other than the middle-school zoo stuff: There were also two goats in the school courtyard as part of the same program. One time after football practice my friend set them loose. They roamed the halls all night and ate an entire art project that was hanging on the wall.)