Smoly Being Smoly

Unfortunately, the unlucky Smoly once again merited his nickname on Friday.

For years in Boston, their rabid Red Sox fans would always watch in disbelief some of the ridiculous things Manny Ramirez would do on the baseball field or say off of it.

They finally accepted it, passing it off as "Manny being Manny".

Well, we here in Prague with the Tempo Titans Praha Baseball Club have our own version of Manny. His name is Jakub Nedved, though everyone knows him simply as Smoly. Where do they get that nickname, you may ask? Well, Smoly is short for "smolný", which in the Czech language means "unlucky".

They informed me of his nickname at the first indoor practice I was at in late January, and I just figured it was spelled "Smally" and related to his size (he's a very athletic 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds). Kind of like calling a big guy "Tiny" or the bald guy from The Three Stooges "Curly".

Then within a couple weeks of my arrival he had showed up to practice with a noticeable limp, having apparently rolled an ankle after slipping on some ice; he fouled a ball off the top of his foot and had to sit out much of the remainder of a workout; and a ball flew seemingly out of nowhere when the infielders were doing some drill work and smacked him in the hip. It was in the middle of all this that the guys on the team told me the meaning of his nickname.

In the four months since my arrival, I've heard several more stories about how Jakub earned and continues to merit his nickname, most of them funny, though some painful sounding.

Well, Smoly was back to his old tricks this past Friday. While out on a date with his girlfriend, he stumbled climbing the steps onto a bus and broke his right hand while attempting to break (no pun intended) his fall. This comes about a year after he broke the same hand after punching a wall in the locker room in frustration after a bad game. That occurrence may have had more to do with him being a knucklehead than being unlucky, but you get the point here.

One of the guys said on Sunday before our games that this was actually "the latest Smoly has made it into a season without getting hurt," though I'm sure that doesn't make him feel any better about his latest mishap. He's out 3-4 weeks while recovering, and that's a big loss for us considering he's hitting .345 with three home runs and nine RBI in nine league games.

We will welcome his return to the lineup in a few weeks to help us with our final push through the regular season. In the meantime, I'll keep you posted of anymore stories of Smoly being Smoly. Hopefully, any such stories will just be funny and not of the painful variety.