{"id":1102,"date":"2026-07-27T12:05:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2026-07-27T12:05:55","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:05:55","slug":"take-me-out-to-the-brainball-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1102","title":{"rendered":"Take Me Out to the Brainball Game"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There are roughly four thousand neurosurgeons in the United States, and some eight hundred of them were in Central Park, playing softball, the other day. \u201cIt\u2019s not a good weekend to get a head injury somewhere other than New York,\u201d Michael Rosner, the chair of the neurological-surgery department at George Washington University, said between games. Only two or three surgeons from Rosner\u2019s department remained on duty. The rest were wearing pin-striped jerseys with nicknames printed on the back: Stinger, Night Hawk, Tex-Lif. For weeks, they\u2019d been training by playing in a D.C. rec league (team name: Ducks on the Pond), capping off fourteen-hour shifts with slow-pitch under the lights. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a big deal,\u201d Stinger, the second baseman, said. \u201cAnd by \u2018kind of,\u2019 I mean it\u2019s discussed every fucking day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Get Yer Statue of Liberty Here!<\/a><\/p>\n

What began in 2004 as a lark\u2014an intramural softball tournament among the residents and attending neurosurgeons at Columbia, Cornell, N.Y.U., and Mount Sinai\u2014has grown into a national philanthropic tradition that made the cover of the peer-reviewed Journal of Neurosurgery<\/em>. (\u201cThe trophy consists of a skull and cervical spine attached to a wooden block, with a gold-painted softball placed in the posterior fossa,\u201d the Journal<\/em> reported.) \u201cIt very quickly expanded to eight and then twelve, and sixteen\u2014and now it\u2019s fifty-six teams this year,\u201d Ricardo Komotar, the co-director of the Brain Tumor Institute at the University of Miami, said. He was standing next to his old boss at Columbia, Jeffrey Bruce, and wearing copious amounts of eye black and a cap turned backward. Komotar, the tournament\u2019s founder, has a reputation for doing hundreds of pushups outside the O.R. He begins each day with a cold plunge. He used to play center field for Miami (neuro champs in 2012 and 2016), but now, nearing fifty, he plays first base.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe old-man position,\u201d Bruce said. (He plays it, too.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe job of a neurosurgery resident is probably one of the most challenging jobs across all professions, and for seven years it\u2019s just grind, grind, grind,\u201d Komotar went on. \u201cThis gives the residents a forty-eight-hour window to get away from that and see what life is really about.\u201d Scores were updated in real time on a dedicated app. Some teams included women. Some, but not all, invited their women to take positions on the field. The games were short\u2014three innings apiece. The hits were often long, despite ample backspin from the pitchers, many wearing brain buckets. At least one participant had not been medically cleared to play, after a stint in the I.C.U. last winter. (He allowed himself a pinch-runner.) A well-built man whose teammates called him Piss, or Pisser, appeared to recount the glories of a grand slam he\u2019d just hit to a friend on FaceTime. (\u201cEgo is part of how surgery gets better,\u201d another slugger said.) A civilian on a stroll stopped to ask what the intensity was all about. Brain surgeons: go figure. \u201cCareful with the hands, guys,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe always joke about people hiring residents based on athletic performance,\u201d Komotar said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if people actually do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s too much at stake,\u201d Bruce said. \u201cYou want to train a brain surgeon just because he can play softball once a year?\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more John Leguizamo Is a Noble Fellow<\/a><\/p>\n

Both of their teams were undefeated after round-robin play, as was George Washington, but no one looked optimistic about dethroning the reigning champions, from the Barrow Neurological Institute, in Phoenix. A headline on the Barrow website reads, \u201cBarrow Uses \u2018Surgeon-Athlete\u2019 Model When Training Neurosurgery Residents.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re kind of like the New England Patriots during Spygate or Deflategate,\u201d Barrow\u2019s chairman, Michael Lawton, said, noting that the team hadn\u2019t lost a game since he became manager, in 2017. \u201cPeople want to beat us.\u201d He accused Komotar of stacking the brackets, and recalled the last time they\u2019d faced each other in the championship, in 2022. Final score: Barrow 45, Miami 7. \u201cNo mercy,\u201d Lawton said. \u201cWe absolutely buried him. The guys were just hitting home run after home run.\u201d And that was before Lawton hired a winner of the Tewaaraton Award, lacrosse\u2019s Heisman, not to mention an ex-minor leaguer in the Minnesota Twins organization, both of whom stood over six feet in their cleats and were in possession of surgically superfluous shoulders.<\/p>\n

The championship this year pitted Barrow against the Mayo Clinic, which blasted heavy metal for inspiration. Of note: Mayo had two brothers, the Ransoms, both surgeons in the same clinic (way to go, Mom and Dad!), and one of them cracked a three-run dinger in the top of the first. But then came Barrow\u2019s turn at the plate. \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2018When Animals Attack!\u2019\u00a0\u201d Komotar said, after a string of extra-base hits quickly erased the Mayo lead.<\/p>\n

As per tradition, there was to be a party at a hotel downtown that night. \u201cWe always come late,\u201d Lawton said. \u201cIt\u2019s a sign of disrespect.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more How Netanyahu\u2019s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hundreds of neurosurgeons gathered in Central Park for inter-hospital softball. Who took home the skull-shaped trophy? Ben McGrath reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-sporting-scene"],"yoast_head":"\nTake Me Out to the Brainball Game - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1102\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Take Me Out to the Brainball Game - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hundreds of neurosurgeons gathered in Central Park for inter-hospital softball. 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