left hand last sunday

It’s not the optimal path — Justin Herbert finishing the Chargers season with a cast on his non-throwing hand — but it’s not a unique one, either.

Herbert suffered a fracture in his left hand last Sunday, when it collided with the helmet of a Las Vegas Raiders defender. The quarterback handled the hit with such little fanfare that TV only took notice minutes later, after he had thrown a touchdown pass on the subsequent play.

He underwent surgery Monday to stabilize the break and, barring any setbacks, was hellbent on playing in Monday night’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles.

That’s part of the life of a quarterback, the expectations of toughness and stoicism, and the reliance on improvisation, even when a hand is swaddled in a cast or heavy brace.

Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert looks up at Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby after he pushed him to the turf for a personal foul penalty late in a game on Nov. 30 at SoFi Stadium.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“The doctors will tell you this one sentence that determines whether you’re going to play: `You’re can’t hurt it any worse,’” said retired NFL quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, who played for 18 seasons through all sorts of injuries. “That doesn’t mean you won’t be in excruciating pain. You probably will. It means you’re not going to break it worse, and the remedy is still the remedy.”

The issue isn’t throwing the ball. Herbert is right-handed and doesn’t need his left hand to pass. But it’s in taking a snap from under center — all of his remaining snaps against the Raiders were from the shotgun formation — and handing off on runs to his right, which normally he would do with his left hand.

“Typically, you’ll see a quarterback with a cast extending both hands so they don’t lose the grip,” said Rich Gannon who had a broken hand when playing for the Oakland Raiders and wore a cast that was hinged upward so he could take a snap. “With handing off, you can’t be fooling around and changing it on the fly. You have to practice it during the week.”

With other injuries, painkilling injections are an option to help get a player onto the field. Not so with a lot of hand injuries.

“You can’t really inject that area,” Gannon said. “If you numb that, you won’t be able to feel and grip the ball. Also, there are so many ligaments and bones in there, if you numb it you can do more damage and not even know it. You’ve just got to tough it out, grin and bear it, and let pain be your guide.”

What’s more, everyone knows about the injury. If it’s an NFL quarterback and his hand, it’s been a topic of discussion all week — not just among fans, but with the opposing team.

“The team you’re playing will say, `He’s only got one hand. He can’t grip the ball that well. Let’s come down there with two violent arms and see if we can get that ball out,’” Gannon said. “These guys aren’t stupid. I’m not saying they’re going to go out of their way to slap his hand, but if he’s got an issue, they’re going to test it.”

There’s an axiom in football that if your quarterback isn’t the toughest guy on your team, you’re in trouble. The game demands that kind of grit.

Seahawks Matt Hasselbeck reaches out to hand off the ball while his hand is wrapped in a cast during a 2011 playoff game against the New Orleans Saints.

(Jonathan Ferrey / Getty Images)

Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young puts it a slightly different way.

“I’m not saying that your quarterback is as tough as a defensive lineman,” he said. “But if your quarterback doesn’t have that toughness, it slowly starts to erode the locker room.”

The quarterback sets the standard on the team, he said, and creates a “sacred trust” that he’s going to do everything he possibly can to be out on the field.

“The second your teammates think you’re trying to duck something, it allows other people to duck and they feel righteous about it,” he said. “You build that trust so that when you actually can’t play, you can look them in the eyes and say, `I can’t go.’ And then they say, `Bro, we get it.’

“You’re asking your linemen to go out there and get in a fight every week, put their bodies on the line and battle in anonymity. And as a quarterback you’re out there making millions and millions of dollars. But I can tell you nobody counts their money at the moment of impact. … You need to want to run into that guy and feel like there’s a purpose greater than yourself. That’s how great locker rooms are made.”

When it comes to doing whatever is necessary to stay on the field, Steve DeBerg was iconic.

He was playing quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs in 1990 when, in a December game against the Houston Oilers, he was sandwiched between a pair of pass rushers just as he released the ball. The two defenders banged helmets, with DeBerg’s left pinkie pinched between them. It was as if his finger was smashed between bricks.

“The referee comes up to me and says, `Steve, Steve, you gotta go out of the game,’” DeBerg recalled. “I said, `No, I got up in time [after the defenders hit him].’ And he said, `You need to look at your left hand.’ I looked down and my pinkie was turned sideways. Blood was shooting out of my finger with every heartbeat.”

He went to the locker room, got an X-ray and learned his finger was broken in nine places. He wanted to keep playing, though, so trainers applied a splint that was essentially a popsicle stick.

He tried practicing a snap on the sideline with center Mike Webster, and that was so witheringly painful he vividly remembers it 35 years later. “It took me about five minutes to compose myself after that,” he said.

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Steve DeBerg points and calls a play on the line of scrimmage during a game against the Seattle Seahawks in 1988

(Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)

DeBerg finished the game in shotgun. He had surgery the next day, with three pins implanted in his finger. He didn’t miss any more time because of it, and wore a cast that was cartoonish in its size and shape. It was enormous and looked like the bottom half of a lobster’s pincer.

That cast now sits in his home office, autographed by his best friend and former Chiefs teammate, running back Christian Okoye, who wrote his name and simply “Thanks.”

“Thanks for what?” DeBerg teased him upon reading that. “Thanks for you missing a block and me getting my finger shattered?”

When he was a senior in college, Archie Manning suffered a broken left forearm that required three screws and a plate. He spent nearly a week in the hospital and missed the next week’s game before returning to play with a cast that now sits in a display case at Ole Miss.

He got used to that cast, even though it affixed his arm at a 90-degree angle. He was wearing it when he ran for 95 yards and two touchdowns against Auburn in the 1971 Gator Bowl.

“I made one run where I went back across the field twice and even made the same guy miss a couple times,” Manning said.

“I bet Justin is going to be OK. He’s got to get the handoff down, but it’s not going to affect his passing.”

Herbert isn’t the only quarterback currently dealing with a cast. Pittsburgh’s Aaron Rodgers suffered three fractures to his left wrist in a game against Cincinnati three weeks ago.

Hasselbeck had a similar injury in 2010 when he was quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks. It happened against Arizona, and his center, Chris Spencer, sustained a broken thumb in the same game. As a result, the tandem never took snaps in practice for the rest of the season.

“I had a cast on my left hand, he had a cast on his right hand,” Hasselbeck said. “We would just pretend to snap for practice, and then for the games they would cut the cast off my wrist and put me in a splint or a brace.”

Another problem with that type of injury, Hasselbeck said, is you can’t cushion your fall when you’re falling.

“Normally, when you go to the ground, you kind of brace yourself by putting your off-hand down,” he said. “I watched Aaron Rodgers break his nose this week, because when you fall you basically have to bellyflop. There’s no breaking your fall. I ended up coming away with other injuries because I couldn’t protect myself going to the ground. It’s one of the hidden things you don’t know about when you hurt your left arm.”

Hasselbeck had a hero in Sam Ramsden, who was head athletic trainer for the Seahawks at the time and now the club’s vice president of player performance.

Ramsden, who learned under legendary Green Bay Packers trainer Pepper Burruss, was something of a mad scientist with the casts and braces he would craft for Hasselbeck on a weekly basis.

“He’s a problem solver kind of guy,” Hasselbeck said. “He’d design a cast and we’d test it out, and it was phenomenal.”

For Ramsden, it was a new puzzle every week.

“No quarterback in the history of the NFL has ever played 100% healthy,” the trainer said. “Matt was super fun. He made me a better athletic trainer because he presented me with so many different challenges.”

Depending on the magnitude of the game, and of the challenge, Burruss would name the cast after a mountain peak, and use a Sharpie to inscribe the cast accordingly. So for a normal game, Burruss might name the cast “Rainier.” The Super Bowl — which the Seahawks didn’t reach that season — would have been “Everest.”

Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck holds the ball in one hand while the other is wrapped in a cast during a game against the Saints in 2010 .

(Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)

In the playoff game against New Orleans, Hasselbeck was fitted with “Kilimanjaro.” That classic will forever be known in Seattle as the Beast Quake game, when Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch broke nine tackles to score a 67-yard touchdown. So raucous was the responding celebration by Seattle fans that it registered a magnitude 2.0 on a nearby seismometer.

One of the behind-the-scenes details of that was Hasselbeck winced in pain every time he used his left hand to put the football in Lynch’s belly. It was tantamount to sticking his injured hand in a lion’s mouth.

“His eyes are looking at the hole, and he takes the ball and just closes down on it,” the quarterback said. “Your hands are supposed to slip out. Marshawn had sort of grippy gloves, and they would stick to my cast. That was the most painful thing.”

No complaints. It’s all part of the job.

“I look at a guy like Baker Mayfield in Tampa,” Hasselbeck said. “He’s playing with a sprained AC joint [in his shoulder]. That means on game day they’re basically going to put Novocaine in his shoulder and he’s going to suck it up for four hours. He’ll feel no pain and then he’s going to have the most miserable night of his life after that.

“And that’s just what the locker room expects. You set the tone.”