AMERICA AT LARGE:Kendry Morales broke his leg last Sunday because he was acting like a kid, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

OVER THE past few days American television has been saturated with replays of the bizarre injury which in all likelihood ended Kendry Morales’s 2010 season last Sunday, one needn’t know the first thing about baseball to recognise it as a sign of the times. To the best of anyone’s knowledge it may have been the first time in the annals of the national pastime that a player has broken his leg celebrating a game-winning, walk-off home run.

Sports columnists, and not just those in Anaheim, have pontificated on the circumstances, describing Morales’s misfortune (not without some justification) as one of those accidents that had been waiting to happen. Others have directed the blame at the climate of look-at-me exhibitionism that seems to pervade modern-day sport the world over, but it strikes us that in the case at hand they may be barking up the wrong tree.

Morales didn’t break his leg because he was acting like a self-absorbed jerk; he broke it because he was acting like a kid.

But the episode would appear nonetheless destined to affect the manner in which such feats are celebrated in the future.

To briefly summarise Sunday’s events in California, the Angels and the Seattle Mariners, deadlocked after nine, went into extra innings. The score was still tied at 1-1, but the bases were loaded with one out when Morales, the Cuban-born first baseman who finished fifth in last year’s voting for the American League’s Most Valuable Player, came to the plate.

He ended the game with one swing of the bat, depositing the pitch well beyond the fence in straightaway centre field for a 5-1 Angels win. Still obligated to circle the bases, Morales looked up as he rounded third and saw, as has become the custom among the present generation of ballplayers, that the entire Angels team was waiting to greet him at home plate. As he approached he couldn’t even have begun to guess at the precise location of the plate, but he launched himself into the air intending to come down somewhere in the midst of the mosh pit.

Next thing anybody knew he was writhing around on the ground and, after EMTs and golf cart-borne stretcher were summoned, he was transported by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where X-rays confirmed a fracture of the left fibula.

Kendry’s YouTube moment may well have been a death-blow for the three-time defending American League West champions. The Angels are currently mired in third place in their division, trailing both Oakland and Texas. Morales led the club with 34 home runs last year, and Sunday’s homer was his 11th of 2010. Playing catch-up will be all the more difficult in his absence. “It wasn’t fun,” said manager Mike Scioscia. “It’s sickening to lose a player the way we lost Kendry – and it’s not going to happen again here.”

Indeed, managers all around the major leagues seemed to be revising their directives for celebratory comportment lest they, too, be visited by a similarly freakish injury.

Black-and-white footage of major leaguers accomplishing similar feats in the not-so-distant past reveals an almost strained attempt to retain a semblance of dignity. A player who’d hit a ball over the fence to win the game grimly maintained composure as he rounded the bases, carefully avoiding any demonstrative gestures to which an opponent might take offence. He might reach out to slap some skin with the third-base coach on his way by, but any high-fiving with team-mates would take place in the privacy of the dugout. The unwritten rule against “showing up” the opposition was a paramount consideration.

And with the final out, in bygone times, the catcher might come out and shake the pitcher’s hand, but that was pretty much it.

Nowadays every player, coach, manager and batboy feels obligated to form a conga line in the vicinity of the mound. A winning pitcher can’t get off the field without shaking at least 30 hands first.

But, you know, times change. Try to imagine Nicklaus or Hogan trying to whip up the gallery with a triple fist-pump after making a six-foot putt, Roosevelt Grier doing a sack dance after felling an opposing quarterback. Or for that matter, Bobby Charlton pulling his jersey over his head and making like an airplane after scoring a routine goal.

No baseball player who ever lived thought more of himself than Babe Ruth, but he never pulled this stuff.

But these individual demonstrations by the self-promoting athlete, loathsome as those might be, didn’t really come into play in the pig-pile at the plate that produced Morales’s injury. While some columnists have gone to great lengths to equate the behaviours, it strikes me that when entire team empties out of the dugout to congratulate a batter or a pitcher today, they’re not styling so much as doing exactly what their coaches back in Little League and in High School encouraged them to do.

If multi-million dollar major leaguers want to act like they’re kids having fun again, who are we to criticise them for it.

On the other hand, a natural by-product of these team-oriented demonstrations is that it inevitably encourages audience participation. And if there’s one thing today’s sport needs even less than show-off athletes, it’s show-off spectators.

When the Yankees’ Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history more than half a century ago the celebration did not merit the participation of most of his team-mates, much less any spectators. If memory serves, after the final out, Larsen and catcher Yogi Berra met halfway between the pitchers mound and home plate, Yogi jumped into the pitcher’s arms and, wrapping his legs around the pitcher’s waist in the manner of a pet chimpanzee, held the pose while a few back-slapping team-mates filed by. But fans remained in their seats.

Almost as long as Americans have played football fans have been known to celebrate a significant victory by tearing down the goal-posts. The practice, which had its origins in the college game, was more readily accomplished when goal-posts were still constructed of whitewashed wood; by the time it spread to the NFL, technology had intervened. The modern-day goal-post, made of steel or cast iron and rooted in cement, discouraged the practice somewhat, as did the increasing presence of armed constables ringing the end zones.

After the 1985 season finale against the Miami Dolphins, exuberant partisans of the New England Patriots swarmed onto the field in such profusion that the gendarmes were put to flight.

Wrenching a goal-post from its moorings in the north end zone, the delirious mob proceeded to carry it right out of Foxboro Stadium, parading their cumbersome trophy as if it had been Goliath’s head on a pike. They had progressed a few hundred yards down Route One toward Boston or, more probably, the nearest pub, when the goal-post made contact with an overhead power line, producing a shower of sparks and sending several literally shocked celebrants to a nearby hospital with electrical burns.