AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Major League Baseball's opening day is this week. But this season, a number of players will be on the bench for the first game, out with an injury to a bone in their hand. It's called a broken hamate, and the number of these injuries is spiking. A lot of this year's bench players were injured during spring training. Joining us now to talk about the hamate and why it's breaking in baseball is Dr. Thomas DiLiberti. He's an orthopedic surgeon based in Dallas, Texas, and has treated dozens of players who've broken this bone. Thank you for being with us.
THOMAS DILIBERTI: Yeah. Glad to be here.
RASCOE: All right. I'm looking at my hand right now. Which bone is the hamate?
DILIBERTI: It's one of the bones that's in the palm. So if you feel the side of your palm near the wrist crease by your small finger, you feel a little bone poking out under the skin. That bone that you can feel with your finger, that's not the hamate, but the hamate is about a centimeter farther down and a centimeter farther in.
RASCOE: OK. And how are baseball players breaking this bone?
DILIBERTI: Well, hamate injuries have been around for a long time. And what's been happening is baseball has gone through some changes where people would actually choke up on the bat, you know, to try to make it shorter and get more control. And then it really didn't put the hamate at much risk. But what they've realized is that if you hold the bat farther and farther down, the end of the bat is swinging faster. They've been moving their hand farther and farther down the bat almost to the point that the small finger is not even on the bat. It just wraps over the butt of the bat. And what that does is it puts that knob end of the bat literally directly over that hook of the hamate. And then when they strike the ball, if the bat has a weird torque to it, it's pushing right on that bone, and it can snap it off.
RASCOE: Well, and any injury can alter the course of an athlete's career, but how does a broken hamate affect hitters once they've healed up?
DILIBERTI: Where that hamate bone is that is broken, the tendons to your fingers, especially the ring and small finger, kind of wrap right around where that bone projects up. So when you fracture the hamate hook, those tendons are now kind of rubbing over an injured area, and it affects the way you grip and maybe how tightly you can grip, so there are some little effects like this. And it might not be a huge difference, but in a professional athlete, if it changes the way they swing or their grip strength, you know, even 5 or 10%, that may make a difference in their job.
RASCOE: Well, and, you know, obviously, it's not just professionals, but millions of American kids and teens play baseball. How much attention should they and their parents give to this issue?
DILIBERTI: We have had to do this operation on numbers of high school kids 'cause, you know, some of the high school kids are big and strong and powerful, as you can imagine, and they can break them just like everybody else. I think that it's becoming a little bit more in the spotlight, and with social media and everything else, I think a lot of the parents have now heard about this. And so I do feel like even at the high school and college level, people are definitely paying more attention to the - these hamate injuries.
RASCOE: That's Dr. Thomas DiLiberti. He is a Dallas-based orthopedic surgeon who specializes in hamate injuries. Thank you so much for being with us today.
DILIBERTI: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much.
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