I asked about this nine years ago on the TV Tropes YKTS section, and got no answers. Recently, I decided to check again, and saw that I'd commented on an unaccepted (and possibly wrong) answer that it was indeed the story I was looking for.
It was a science fiction story that I read in the early 1990s involving a baseball team in a climactic game against aliens for some absurdly high stake. And they lose, in part due a player having what I remembered as a "trick knee", although it was many years later that I learned this was not a positive thing to have.