Brandon Inge's Knee Pain 'Excruciating'

Generally when you get to this point in the baseball season as a player, whether you're on a disabled list or not, you aren't completely healthy. You may not have a broken bone, but odds are when you wake up in the morning your body feels like you just fell out of a fifth story window. It's just something that can be avoided over the course of a 162-game schedule.

So it's safe to assume that there are no everyday players in the league right now who aren't dealing with some kind of ache or pain, but most of them probably aren't playing through what Tigers third baseman Brandon Inge is going through. He has pain in both of his knees, including a 75 percent tear of the middle portion of the patella tendon in his left knee. That's not going to keep him off the field, at least, not if he can help it.

Inge said the knee is constantly sore and that any type of athletic move -- even getting into a hitting position in the batter's box -- causes him "excruciating pain."

"It affects everything you do," he said. "Anything that gets you in any sort of an athletic position, that's what hurts. Anything.

"It's not fun playing like this."

Inge also says that since there's no guarantee his knee would be healed after spending time on the 15-day disabled list, he sees no reason to go on it and will continue playing through the pain -- something for which it is hard to blame him. Not only is he having a career year with the Tigers, making the All-Star team for the first time, but his team is also holding on to a one-game lead in the AL Central.

As a key cog in Detroit's lineup, any time he misses could alter the course of the Tigers' season, so it's commendable that he'd be willing to gut it out for his team. At the same time, Inge may want to think about his life after baseball. If he continues to play through this, there's no telling what kind of damage he may do to his knee not only for this season, but for the rest of his life.

It's a tough decision for any player to make, and one I'm happy I don't have to make.