Take Me Out to the Brainball Game
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. “It’s not a good weekend to get a head injury somewhere other than New York,” Michael Rosner, the chair of the neurological-surgery department at George Washington University, said between games. Only two or three surgeons from Rosner’s 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’d 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. “It’s kind of a big deal,” Stinger, the second baseman, said. “And by ‘kind of,’ I mean it’s discussed every fucking day.”
What began in 2004 as a lark—an intramural softball tournament among the residents and attending neurosurgeons at Columbia, Cornell, N.Y.U., and Mount Sinai—has grown into a national philanthropic tradition that made the cover of the peer-reviewed Journal of Neurosurgery. (“The trophy consists of a skull and cervical spine attached to a wooden block, with a gold-painted softball placed in the posterior fossa,” the Journal reported.) “It very quickly expanded to eight and then twelve, and sixteen—and now it’s fifty-six teams this year,” 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’s 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.
“The old-man position,” Bruce said. (He plays it, too.)
“The job of a neurosurgery resident is probably one of the most challenging jobs across all professions, and for seven years it’s just grind, grind, grind,” Komotar went on. “This gives the residents a forty-eight-hour window to get away from that and see what life is really about.” 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—three 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’d just hit to a friend on FaceTime. (“Ego is part of how surgery gets better,” another slugger said.) A civilian on a stroll stopped to ask what the intensity was all about. Brain surgeons: go figure. “Careful with the hands, guys,” he said.
“We always joke about people hiring residents based on athletic performance,” Komotar said. “I don’t know if people actually do it.”
“It’s too much at stake,” Bruce said. “You want to train a brain surgeon just because he can play softball once a year?”
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, “Barrow Uses ‘Surgeon-Athlete’ Model When Training Neurosurgery Residents.”
“We’re kind of like the New England Patriots during Spygate or Deflategate,” Barrow’s chairman, Michael Lawton, said, noting that the team hadn’t lost a game since he became manager, in 2017. “People want to beat us.” He accused Komotar of stacking the brackets, and recalled the last time they’d faced each other in the championship, in 2022. Final score: Barrow 45, Miami 7. “No mercy,” Lawton said. “We absolutely buried him. The guys were just hitting home run after home run.” And that was before Lawton hired a winner of the Tewaaraton Award, lacrosse’s 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.
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’s turn at the plate. “It’s like ‘When Animals Attack!’ ” Komotar said, after a string of extra-base hits quickly erased the Mayo lead.
As per tradition, there was to be a party at a hotel downtown that night. “We always come late,” Lawton said. “It’s a sign of disrespect.” ♦