This was so lame, we even heard about it in Italy. Well, thanks to espn.com … but if it hadn’t been so spectacularly lame, it wouldn’t have gotten enough exposure for me to see it and read about it. When you’re spending your days walking on the beach in Italy and napping and trying to figure out what variety of ridiculously nice food you will have that night … well, you barely have time to keep track of the Lakers. You certainly aren’t inclined to follow baseball play-by-play.

But this … this was spectacularly lame.

In case you also are in Italy and didn’t see it, the Angels’ best player these days, Kendrys Morales, suffered a broken ankle when he landed on it awkwardly while being jostled by a mob of his doltish teammates after a game-ending (walk-off) grand slam on Saturday.

The Angels have reacted to this correctly … and maybe a few other teams will have the wit to learn from their ridiculous situation.

The original game story has Morales “landing awkwardly.” As if his leg were a toothpick ready to snap under the slightest pressure.

But watch the video with that espn.com game story (linked above) and you see that Morales was bumped fairly hard while in the air (Maicer Izturis, Erick Aybar and Juan Rivera seem the most likely culprits) and headed for a landing on home plate, and while it is difficult to tell exactly what happened, it seems infinitely more likely that he suffered the broken ankle because he was knocked off-balance — not because he had a bad ankle about to bust.

Manager Mike Scioscia was angry after the game. “It will change the way we celebrate,” he told reporters in Anaheim.

This morning, he held a team meeting to talk about how the club will react to walk-off homers/hits in the future.

“Yesterday’s event was terrible and it was something that I think we need to address,” Scioscia said. “It’s happened before in baseball. It’s not going to happen again here. We need to do a better job than to get hurt in a dogpile scenario celebrating a win.”

Asked what the new guidelines were, Scioscia said: “Any other way than the way we did yesterday.”

Bobby Abreu was asked about what the manager told the team. “He just said, ‘Give a guy space and, you know, just easy-going.’ We understand that.”

Well, duh.

Scioscia the day before suggested the capering crowds at home plate had been an “accident waiting to happen.” Indeed, previous reports indicated guys tweaked muscles or suffered injuries while banging bodies like that.

But losing Morales — oh, and there is a chance he may not be back this season — is the worst yet.

The Angels had a chance to test the new rule later in the day, in the bottom of the ninth, when Howie Kendrick hit a walkoff homer of his own. As espn.com reported, “Kendrick had a clear path and touched home plate the normal way as his jubilant teammates ran on the field and kept a safe distance from the foul line before mobbing him.”

Check the video and note the space that Kendrick was given. Well, of course. How does it go about closing barn doors after the horses have escaped?

Other stories have noted some of the injuries suffered by celebrating players, from Washington Redskins quarterback Gus Frerotte spraining his neck while head-butting a wall to Arizona Cardinals kicker Bill Grammatica tearing an ACL after celebrating a field goal.

The ridiculous injury I remember best was at the BCS national championship football game at Glendale, Ariz., on January of 2007.

Ted Ginn, Ohio State’s best skill player,  returned the opening kickoff 92 yards for a touchdown … and then was buried under a batch of teammates, suffered a left-ankle injury — and never got a play from the line of scrimmage. Completely unnecessary. Ohio State was so embarrassed by the incident that it didn’t reveal the extent of Ginn’s injury until a full day after the game — won by Florida, 41-14. Oh, and the ankle injury followed him into his first year in the NFL, too, limiting his playing time.

So, idiotic celebrations? Leave that to drunken frat boys. Too much money is riding on the health of teams’ best players to let teammates knock them around because they’re having fun.