A few weeks before my 13th birthday I broke my ankle sliding into home plate on the baseball diamond at school. The problem was that home plate was a cinderblock buried in the ground, except for an inch that remained just above ground.

Someone thought this was a good idea because it made it easier to see if a pitch was a ball or a strike.

Like the shattering of a cracked bat, you could hear the bones in my ankle shatter and crack as I slid safely home. Two classmates made a cross-armed seat and carried me into the classroom, where I sat at my desk for the next hour until school was out for the day.

We didn