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A fan fell about 30 feet from the second deck area of the Rangers/Indians game last night and landed on some seats and spectators below. He was trying to catch a ball that had been fouled there in the 5th inning. The game was stopped for around 15 minutes while the fan was treated and carried out. The report was he showed some response and was able to move, but no further report on his condition at this time. Fortunately none of the fans he fell on were seriously injured. Cleveland was in the field at that time and some of the players who saw him fall appeared visibly shaken. While this type of accident is rare I have been surprised that people are not seriously injured or killed by fouls lined into the stands. There is a huge difference between pop flies that drop into the stands and balls that are hit as hard as a ball can be hit and lined into the seats along the first or third base line. Just a few week ago a woman was killed when she hit by a line drive at a minor league game in the Dallas area. I know it is not possible to take all the risks out of life, and we may be more likley to be killed in a wreck driving to the game. But as hard as some balls are being hit into the stands is it time to think about some way to portect fans before we have a tragedy.
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
This thread immediately made me think of a classic Baltimore sports story that was well before my time. My father used to tell this story. It happened at Memorial stadium. Back when the Baltimore Colts and the Baltimore Orioles both played there. When both professional teams in Charm City were winners and champions. One day/night thousands upon thousands poured into the stadium to cheer on one of our fabled franchises. Stairways and alley ways were packed. The escalators were filled to capacity every step of the way. Suddenly, without warning, the escalators began to shake and then they tore away from the cement that held them in place in the great stadium structure and KA-BOOM!!! The escalator full of patrons collapsed to the ground is a puff of smoke and rubel. Many were injured in the great escalator collapse year, and I even think a few died. A very tragic day in the Baltimore sports world and one that I think about every time I step onto the express escalators at Camden Yards.
Perhaps someone a little older could chime in with the specifics (i don't know if it was an O's or Colts game). Did anyone get hurt at Candlestick park in 1991? when the earthquake shook the stadium dark?
As for protecting the closer seats, I think there has to be a little bit of common sense used...if the people can't handle it they shouldn't be sitting there, it is a choice after all. I know not everyone has common sense, but for the most part this vulnerability stems from "older" folks sitting there, however I think that most elders would cordially step aside without fear of embarrassment if they thought themselves in harms way...thats how they got to be a ripe old age anyway, via self preservation
wade -
Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
Speaking of the Rangers...their old spring training camp in Port Charlotte had the potential for a worse disaster in the 1990s. There were a couple of retention ponds beyond the left and left-center field fences. These ponds occasionally had alligators near them and in them. The poor Rangers fan's situation was an accident...but the retention ponds found some of the Chicago Ballhawks repeatedly jumping into them to retrieve BP and game home runs.
Amazingly, none of the Chi-Town crowd was ever attacked. Personally, I love baseballs, but I don't love 'em THAT much!
Dave MiedemaComment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
As I said, I am somewhat conflicted about what to do about hard hit foul balls and fans protection. Its not just "older" folks. Fans bring their kids too. And not every 20 or 30 year old, especially without a glove, or even with one, has the reflexes to catch a line shot hit by a major league player. Up until the 1920's I believe, there were no nets behind home plate and the seats were called "suicide" seats. Imagine today sitting behind home plate with no net when a batter fouls a 100 mile an hour fastball straight back. They decided to put up nets there to protect the fans 80 years ago. As hard as balls are hit in the stands now maybe they need nets down the line as well. You could still catch the pop fouls without the risk on injury you have now. Just a thought.Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
When you bring the younger fans, the kids, into the debate the next issue then becomes parenting...putting your kids in dangerous situations...responsibility, etcetera etcetera. I didn't want to go that route.
Like an emergency exit on a plane, patrons discretion. If its a solution that we need/want I would propose an age limit in certain seats (however with tickets selling online, scalpers, and the like it would be hard to inforce). I think as the ball parks currently stand it states to be cautious of balls and bats entering the stands during play.
People need to be responsible adults, parents, and fans. If they can't handle it then they shouldn't be there. Anybody in their right mind would remedy any situation in which they felt threatened or the potential for danger. Old or young...PEOPLE just need to be aware and make the decision that is best for them and their party.
All that said, I try to go to atleast one out of town game with my father a year. We try to get the best seat that we can. If we end up in seat in the infield box area or down the line I'M expected to protect him
Basketball fans have the danger of Shaq falling/jumping on them, baseball fans have the risk of BEING part of the game/entertainment, and football fans run the risk of getting beat up in the stands if you are rooting for the wrong team.
In the long run, attending a game is a choice. The seats you purchase is a choice. Games are entertainment which can be thrilling, rewarding and spine tingling (amongst other things). That's why we pay big bucks for better seats, opportunity and chance.
Not trying to beat a dead horse, but at some point...individuals (if they are old enough) or people in general need to stand up and take charge and do the right thing, the wise thing...like people used to. Its not always someone elses fault. Never rule out the worst case scenario!
(I also think that ushers can use their own judgement regarding people that are in danger as well)
wadeComment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
Exactly, very well said. Does the Nanny State mentality need to include telling people which seats they can and cannot sit in? Do we need nets extending down the first and third baselines? No matter how hard you try (and how much freedom you take from people in the process) you cannot remove risk from life.Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
All in the hopes to get a $10 baseball.I guess life is worht the risk of that.And not just the person who fell.As they made the decision to go after the ball.But to me the real innocent people in this.The people the person landed on.Can you inmagine if that was your loved one this person landed on from 30 feet like that.I know i would pissed at the person.But i am sure everyone but me feels sorry for the person who fell.Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
I'm honestly surprised more people don't fall. Some places I've been have the rails just a few inches above my knees (in this case they are 30.25 inches). If you lose your balance at all, that little railing isn't going to do too much, unless it's a child or somebody who's short. And it's not like the guy was drunk and jumping out to get the ball, from what I've read he wasn't drinking at all, the ball landed a few rows behind him, and he was around to watch it. Then the ball bounced back towards him and just as a reaction he grabbed for it and lost his balance and fell backwards. It's very easy to see how it could happen (at least to me).Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
So blame it on the railing and not the guy.Its the railing's fault and not the guy's fault.And that maybe if the guy knew of his surroundings better it would not have happen to him.So they sound put barricades in the upper deck to prevent this.Or better,they should put nets around the whole upper deck of the field.Its like hockey,one person isnt paying attention to the game and cant duck out of the way of a puck and now we have those stubid nets.Pay attention to the game you dont get hit by a puck.Don't go diving for a baseball you dont fall onto innocent people trying to watch a game and now they have some guy on them.And it might be easy to see that happening.But i know it would not happen to me.If i want a baseball i will just buy one.I think those people that go diving for baseballs are idiots.Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
Ha, you're comical. God forbid anything like this would ever happen to you or somebody you care about. It's an accident. Have you heard any talk about adding higher railing or more nets? I didn't think so. I'm not saying it's not the guys fault, but it's not his stupidity that caused it. It's easy to see how it could happen, you lose your balance or slip and you don't have anything to grab on to. I guess you're too perfect though, so nothing like that would ever happen to you.Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
I think making it an issue of responsibility somewhat evades the issue. I have seen very well conditioned, very responsible major league players get hit with a ball. Sometimes they lose it in the white shirts in the seats. If they can get hit so can a spectator.In fact it is obvious a spectator is more likely to be hit. I believe it was in the 1920's that baseball first put up a net behind home plate. Before then the seats behind home plate were called suicide seats. Baseball realized there was too much danger of fans being hurt by fastballs fouled straight back like a rocket into the seats behind home plate. I don't think the people who can sit behind home plate today and enjoy the game with the protection of nets feel they are being protected by a "nanny state." Of course we could take down the nets behind home plate and let only "responsible" fans dressed in catchers gear and face masks sit there instead of families like we do today. Think that would improve the game? The idea of extending nets further down the first and third base lines would allow anyone including young children to sit there and would protect everyone from line drives smoked into the seats. I take the position that NO ONE except people who would qualify as professional baseball players are safe from those, and only if they bring a glove. Everyone would be still be able to catch pop fouls that drop over the net, as they can now behind home plate So address why we shouldn't extend nets to protect all the fans from line drives into the stands rather than argue that only "responsible" people should sit there. Why shouldn't a parent have the right to bring his 6 or 8 year old son to a game with good seats down the line rather than sit in the third deck in the outfield to be "responsible" if extending the nets would do the job.Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
A story on the firefighter who fell. He is doing well and got a hospital visit from Nolan RyanComment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
Oh, for heavens' sake, where does it end? If you want to go on a crusade to save everyone from accidents, why not start with making skydiving and auto racing illegal? Also private pools, since many more children die in pool accidents than by playing/attending baseball games. Same with recreational boating.
Then you can proceed to trample other peoples' freedoms all along the way, putting up nets, making things illegal, and finally you'll get to baseball, forcing every fan in the first deck to have to watch the game through mesh.
Why don't we all just live our entire lives in a sterile hospital ward? Oh, wait, we might slip on the floor.... we'd need to be forced to wear helmets and rubber-soled shoes I guess (or better yet, not be allowed to leave our rooms.)Comment
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Re: Fan falls at Ranger game
From the SI Vault:
April 20, 2009
Hit In The Head : Though deaths caused by thrown or batted balls are rare, frequent close calls, including another last week, keep the issue of ballpark safety in play.
S.L. PRICE
__________________________________________________ _________________
A ROUND THE beginning of February 2007, as the Cleveland Indians' staff was preparing to leave for spring training, team vice president Bob DiBiasio picked up the ringing phone in his office at Jacobs Field. "You've got to get down here," said Jim Goldwire of the team's operations department. "You won't believe what we just found."
DiBiasio rode an elevator down to the stadium's clubhouse level and walked to a storage room that's known as "the promotional warehouse," a dumping ground for bats, baseball caps, bobblehead dolls and other begrimed giveaways from years past. Goldwire and the head of the mail room, Steve Walters, led DiBiasio to one of the piles. They shoved aside a bunch of CC Sabathia hand puppets, brushed the dirt off a wood crate and removed the top. There it was—huge, darkened by oxidation, nearly unreadable. "You've got to be kidding," DiBiasio said.
After he joined the club in 1979, DiBiasio received occasional calls from old-timers looking for a four-by-three-foot, 245-pound bronze plaque dedicated to the late Indians shortstop Ray Chapman. The callers said it had hung in League Park in the '20s, then in Municipal Stadium just after the team moved there in '46. DiBiasio asked around. Nobody in the organization had any memory of the plaque. "I've never seen it," DiBiasio would tell the callers. "We've looked. We don't know what you're talking about." Eventually the calls stopped.
Now, after more than 50 years lost, Ray Chapman's memorial was found. Because of the decay, you couldn't see the two-foot-long bat with the glove dangling from it, or the eulogy embossed along the bottom: HE LIVES IN THE HEARTS OF ALL WHO KNEW HIM. In the ensuing weeks, as the plaque's lettering was sandblasted and polished, all those involved in its restoration took pride in rescuing a vital piece of baseball's past. It didn't matter that it marked one of the game's darkest moments.
Chapman, after all, was the most famous example of the damage a thrown or batted baseball can do. On Aug. 16, 1920, the popular ballplayer—29 years old, newly married, mulling retirement—was hit in the left temple by a fastball fired by Yankees pitcher Carl Mays. He was carried off the field at New York's Polo Grounds and died the next morning, the first and last player ever killed on a major league diamond.
The Indians would honor the man they called Chappie by winning their first World Series that year, and some good would come to the sport in response to his death: Because Mays was suspected of having doctored the ball, professional baseball banned the spitball and began requiring umpires to monitor balls and replace dirty ones. Chapman's name was invoked over the ensuing decades whenever baseball suffered other scares.
And they weren't rare. According to researcher Bob Gorman—who this year published, along with his colleague David Weeks, the definitive account of baseball fatalities, Death at the Ballpark—nine minor leaguers and 111 amateur baseball players as young as eight years old have died as a result of beanings since 1887. More than 90 other players were killed either by pitches that hit other parts of their bodies, usually the chest, or by balls thrown by other fielders. The last pro beaning fatality occurred in June 1951, when Dothan (Ala.) Browns outfielder Ottis Johnson took a pitch by the Headland Dixie Runners' Jack Clifton in the temple, fell unconscious and expired eight days later. Later that month a catcher for the Twin Falls (Idaho) Cowboys, Richard Conway, was killed during fielding practice by a throw that hit him just below the heart.
Among those who survived injuries from thrown or batted balls were some of the best players on the field. In 1957 Indians lefthander Herb Score, who struck out a total of 508 batters in his first two seasons (tops in the American League), was nearly blinded when a liner by the Yankees' Gil McDougald hit him in the right eye. Score's retina was damaged, and he never came close to dominating again. In July 1962 Twins pitcher and 16-time Gold Glove winner Jim Kaat lost three front teeth to a one-hopper by the Tigers' Bubba Morton. Legend has it that after Kaat cleaned up his bloodied mouth and wiped bits of tooth off his glove, he went to a party and responded to his host's startled look by saying, "I was invited, wasn't I?"
Still, nothing matched Ray Chapman for pathos until Aug. 18, 1967, when the left cheekbone of Red Sox rightfielder Tony Conigliaro was pulverized by a rising fastball from the right hand of Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton. Before that night Conigliaro seemed on a sure path to the Hall of Fame: He had homered in his first Fenway Park at bat, in 1964; hit 32 homers in his second season to become, at 20, the youngest home run champ in American League history; and become, at 22, the youngest player ever to reach 100 career home runs. Against Hamilton, Conigliaro was wearing a batting helmet, but not one with a protective earflap, and on impact the ball felt as if, he later said, it would "go in one side of my head and come out the other."
By the time Conigliaro hit the dirt his left eye was purple and swollen to the size of a handball. The retina was permanently damaged; two inches higher, a doctor would later tell him, and he would've been dead. "His whole face was swelling up, blood rushing in there," says Bill Valentine, the home plate umpire that day. "When he hit the ground his eye was completely shut. It was unbelievable."
Hamilton was known for his spitball, and Conigliaro later maintained that the ball had moved unlike any legal pitch. But Hamilton, who had never hit anyone in the head before, has always said that he wasn't throwing at Conigliaro or using his spitter; he blames the shadows and his own incompetence. "The pitch got away from me, in the middle of the afternoon," he says. He tried visiting Conigliaro in the hospital that night but was told only family members could do so. The two men never spoke.
After the incident Conigliaro had some sweet moments—Comeback Player of the Year in 1969, 36 homers in '70—but his eyesight deteriorated. He was traded to the Angels in 1971 and soon retired, came back briefly in '75 and then retired for good. But the black cloud over him never quite lifted. In 1982 he was in Boston interviewing for a Red Sox broadcasting job when he suffered a heart attack, then a coma-inducing stroke. He spent the next eight years in a vegetative state until dying in 1990, at age 45.
BO MCLAUGHLIN can speak matter-of-factly, even laugh a bit, about the night in 1981 when a batted ball ruined his face. He has a tape of the game, and every once in a while at parties he pops it in to liven things up. "You could hear the bones break [through] the microphone hanging from the press box," he says. But in the months immediately following the accident, McLaughlin had little desire to watch baseball, much less play it. The first day he set out for a ball field to work out, he jumped into the front seat of his car, put the keys in the ignition and sat a few minutes before walking back into his house. He tried again the next day, making it out of the driveway and around the block before returning home. On the third day he made it to the field and was able to play catch despite the doubt racking his mind. Do I want to do this? Do I want to put my life out there?
It was a wonder he was even walking. On May 26 of that year, McLaughlin, a relief pitcher for the A's, had started the eighth inning of a losing effort against the White Sox. He got the first two batters out, then threw a 91-mph sinker to Harold Baines, Chicago's second-year rightfielder. Baines couldn't have hit it better. The ball blasted off his bat at 104 mph, dipping and rising like a knuckleball. McLaughlin, all 6'5" of him, rose out of his follow-through to catch it. "Sinker down and away?" Baines says. "That's where I'm supposed to hit the ball: back up the middle. Unfortunately his face was in the way."
The ball shattered McLaughlin's left cheekbone, broke his eye socket in five places and fractured his jaw and nose, spinning him around so that he got a full view of the centerfielder before falling on his back. He vomited five dugout towels' worth of blood and went into shock. "That," says Jackie Moore, the Oakland third base coach at the time, "was as bad as I've ever seen."
Doctors at Oakland's Merritt Hospital weren't sure McLaughlin would survive the night. It took two surgeries to wire his cheekbone and left eye socket. For Baines, meanwhile, speaking with McLaughlin by phone in the ensuing days did little to ease his mind. Baines had been hitting over .300 that month, but he immediately fell into a slump—6 for 42, .143—that ended only when the major league players went on strike 16 days after the accident.
McLaughlin was 27 at the time. A six-year veteran who'd spent most of his career in the bullpen for the Astros and then the A's, winning 10 games and losing 20, he was nobody's idea of special. He came back to pitch for Oakland that September, but the muscles and nerves in his cheek hadn't healed and he couldn't get in shape; when he ran it felt as if a hockey puck were sliding around beneath the skin. He appeared in four games, in which he seemed to be fine until he got two outs; then he fell apart. On Sept. 20 in Chicago he started the eighth inning, got two quick outs, then surrendered three walks and a single, threw a wild pitch and finally saw Baines come to the plate to face him for the first time since the accident. A's catcher Mike Heath gave McLaughlin the sign for a sinker, away, and grinned. McLaughlin backed off and started laughing. "I threw a fastball," he says. "I wasn't interested in getting hit again." Baines popped out to end the inning.
Baines put the accident behind him. He played 20 more years and was one of the best players of his era. He never came close to hitting anyone again. "It's unfortunate," Baines, now a White Sox coach, says of the accident, "but it's part of the game."
McLaughlin played the 1982 season with Oakland. He worked 48 1/3 innings and had a 4.84 ERA. He bounced around the Triple A Pacific Coast League for three more seasons, mostly treating it, he says, "like a beer league." He never had another major league win. He married, had three children, started a real estate business and a baseball camp. In '92 Cubs manager Jim Lefebvre asked him to throw batting practice, and after seven years away it felt O.K. to be on a mound again. McLaughlin coached in the Cubs' minor league system, moved on to Montreal's, then worked as Baltimore's minor league pitching coordinator for three years, from 1999 through 2001. When Baines played for the Orioles in '98 and '99, he and McLaughlin talked a bit, no hard feelings. They played golf. In 2003 McLaughlin joined the Rockies as a pitching coach for the Double A Tulsa Drillers.
There aren't many days that McLaughlin isn't reminded of the accident. When he's home in Phoenix and the temperature hits 113° or so, the metal in his face gets so hot that the whites of his eyes turn red. He's considered a fine coach, committed and communicative, yet he hardly exudes a contagious passion. "I'm not a fan of baseball," he says softly. "Never was."
WHEN THE use of plastic batting helmets was mandated at all levels of professional baseball in 1971, serious injuries from pitched balls instantly declined. (Earflaps became mandatory for new players in 1983.) But the case of Astros shortstop Dickie Thon, whose brilliant career was derailed in 1984 by a fastball to his left eye from the Mets' Mike Torrez, was a shocking reminder of the harm that a pitched ball could still do. And the danger of a batted ball, especially to the man standing on the mound, never faded.
In 1987 Mariners pitcher Steve Shields, who a decade earlier had suffered a seizure and memory loss after taking a line drive to the face in Class A ball, had his cheek broken by a rip up the middle from the Twins' Kirby Puckett. In '95 Phillies reliever Norm Charlton fielded a comebacker from the Padres' Steve Finley with his face. A year later pitcher Mark Gubicza had his final season with the Royals cut short when his left leg was broken by a line drive hit by the Twins' Paul Molitor. In April '97 Mariners pitcher Josias Manzanillo, not wearing a protective cup, suffered tears in both testicles when the Indians' Manny Ramirez blasted a shot into his groin. The next month Tigers pitcher Willie Blair had his jaw broken when another Indian, Julio Franco, cracked a liner up the middle at 107 mph. Herb Score, then an Indians broadcaster, sat silently in the booth as that nightmare played out. It had been almost 40 years since his own accident. "You never see the ball," Score finally said into the mike. "You have no chance."
Just last Thursday, Giants reliever Joe Martinez took a line drive to the head from Brewers outfielder Mike Cameron and left the field with a bleeding forehead and a swollen right eye. As of Monday he was still in the hospital with a concussion and three hairline fractures in his skull but was expected to make a full recovery.
Surprisingly, no professional player at any level on the U.S. mainland has been killed by a batted ball. Of the 76 deaths caused in that manner—five of which involved batters killed by their own foul tips—all occurred in amateur games and included kids as young as six. In Puerto Rico, meanwhile, a catcher named Raul Cabrera died after he was struck in the throat by a foul tip during an amateur game in the town of Yauco in the early 1970s. Tino Sanchez, father of Rockies minor leaguer Tino Sanchez Jr., was sitting in the stands close to home plate in Ovidio (Millino) Rodriguez Park that day. "He was moving, trying to breathe," Sanchez says of Cabrera. "I thought he was going to be O.K., but the next day they told me the player had passed away. That was the first time that had happened in Puerto Rico."
Of course, coaches, umpires and other on-field personnel also run a risk of injury from batted balls. In 1964, 13-year-old Jerry Highfill died after being hit in the head while retrieving batting-practice balls for the Northwest League's Wenatchee (Wash.) Chiefs. Five years later major league umpire Cal Drummond was hit square on the mask by a foul tip at an Orioles game, injuring his brain, and died a year later from a stroke caused by decreased blood supply to the affected area.
Any career baseball man has a near-miss tale. In April 2002 Jackie Moore, then the manager of the Double A Round Rock (Texas) Express, missed nine games after being laid out by a batting-practice line drive. Moore suffered a broken cheekbone and a concussion and required surgery to repair a detached retina. Three years earlier, then Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, who as a minor leaguer in 1953 had lain unconscious for 13 days after being beaned, survived a foul ball to the side of his face during a playoff game. The next day he wore an Army helmet.
When questioned on the topic, however, players and coaches say, almost to a man, that they're most concerned about the safety of the fans. Fifty-two spectators are known to have been killed by foul balls since 1887, two in pro games. In 1960 Dominic LaSala, 68, died after he was hit by a foul ball at a minor league game in Miami. Ten years later 14-year-old Alan Fish died five days after getting struck by a Manny Mota foul ball while sitting along the first base line at Dodger Stadium—the only fatality caused by a batted ball in major league history.
"The first time I took my kids to Yankee Stadium, I was a nervous wreck," says Warren Stephens, whose late father, Jack, the billionaire financier and chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, was knocked out by a line drive while playing third base at Columbia (Tenn.) Military Academy in 1941. "We're just past third base but down really low, and I wouldn't take my eyes off of any pitch. I was scared we would get hammered."
But in the last few decades the sport has done little to shield its oft-distracted spectators. Unlike Japanese ballparks, which have protective screens running from behind the plate all the way to the outfield walls, U.S. major and minor league parks don't even have screens that extend as far as the dugouts—thus allowing dozens of foul balls to fly into crowds at every game. There are, increasingly, ballparks like Tampa's George M. Steinbrenner Field, which has signs at lower-level entrances reading, CAUTION: WATCH FOR LIVE BATS AND BALLS LEAVING THE FIELD AT ALL TIMES. But with no standard, pro baseball leaves the decision on such signage, as well as the breadth of netting in each park, to the discretion of each team.
"It's about balancing the need to protect the fans with maintaining the baseball atmosphere we traditionally enjoy," says Dan Halem, senior vice president and general counsel of labor for Major League Baseball and a member of the game's Safety and Health Advisory Committee. "Netting in the ball fields would certainly change the experience of the game." What fan, after all, doesn't like to take home a foul ball? "Fans demand seats with no netting in front," Halem says. "That's the reality."
But if professional baseball is protected from legal action because of the 145-word warning on the back of each ticket that shifts all responsibility for injury to the fan, it doesn't lessen the danger. "Somebody's going to get hurt," says Hamilton, the pitcher who beaned Conigliaro. "Somebody's going to get hit with one of those broken bats, too, before long." Indeed, since baseball's Safety and Health Advisory Committee was reconstituted in 2008, all of its time—and some $500,000—has been spent studying the increasing trend of bats splintering into dangerous flying shards. "The foul-ball issue has not been discussed," Halem says.
Veteran ballplayers, though, think about it constantly, and many insist that their loved ones sit behind protective netting. First baseman Alan Zinter, who retired in 2007 after playing nearly all of his 19-year career in the minor leagues, took it a step further; he urged complete strangers to sit behind the screen. "I've seen people get hit in the face, just crushed, blood everywhere," Zinter says. "The worst thing I saw was in Nashville: I was hitting lefthanded and I check-swinged and hit a line shot over the dugout that hit a six-year-old boy right in the temple. It was slow motion for me; I'm looking right down the barrel and thinking, Oh, God, and it's heading right toward this family, and the father's not even watching. The kid was looking into leftfield, so he's not watching, and whack! Right in the head. They carried him out of the stadium.
"I couldn't even concentrate after that. I struck out. I kept calling after the game. Kid was in the hospital, and they said he's going to be O.K. Had a concussion, stayed that night. I said, 'Give me his number,' and I ended up calling him when I made it to the big leagues [later that season]." Zinter pauses, watching the moment unreel again in his mind. "His dad ran him up the steps...."
ON MARCH 4, 2007, Mike Coolbaugh and his close friend Jay Maldonado walked onto the field at Theodore Roosevelt High in San Antonio. They'd both been baseball stars there in the late 1980s, but this was no exercise in nostalgia. After 17 years in the minor leagues, Coolbaugh's playing options had seemingly dried up, but an offer had suddenly come from a professional team in Tabasco, Mexico: $10,000 just to show up and try out. Coolbaugh needed to get ready, and Maldonado had come to help; he could still roll out of bed and throw 88 mph.
Coolbaugh was one of those players who feared that his wife or children would get hit by a baseball ripped into the stands. "He was more worried about it than anybody I've ever met," says his wife, Mandy. "He was so aware of what a foul ball could do."
Maldonado and Coolbaugh set up the protective L screen in the grass in front of the pitcher's mound. Maldonado began to throw—slurves, changeups and fastballs, mixing location in and out. His dad, Jesse, who had come along to watch, stood behind home plate, fingers curling through the backstop fencing. The righthanded Maldonado fired one 87-mph fastball and got a bit lazy, stopping on his follow-through so that his head didn't dip behind the high part of the screen. Coolbaugh swung. The ball blazed just over the inside corner of the L. Maldonado saw a flash of white in time to turn his head, and he felt a crack behind his right ear. He dropped to the ground like a sack of stones.
At first Jesse thought his son was gone. Finally Jay sat up, fighting to stay conscious by fixing his eyes on the fence, the bat, Coolbaugh's stricken face—anything. He and Coolbaugh then sat on a bench, their breathing slowly returning to normal.
The wound left a sizable bruise, but Maldonado refused to see a doctor. Coolbaugh went home that night worried. He always paced when something upset him, and he kept it up that night after telling Mandy what happened, fighting back tears. "That can kill a guy," he said.
THE MEXICO tryout didn't lead to a job, but later that season Coolbaugh landed with the Tulsa Drillers as a first base coach. On July 22, 2007, after only 2½ weeks in that position, Coolbaugh was struck in the back of the neck by a foul ball during a game at Dickey-Stephens Park in North Little Rock, Ark., and died almost instantly. He was 35.
In the park that night were several people who had experienced the harm a thrown or batted ball can do. Bo McLaughlin watched from the top step of the Drillers' dugout. Bill Valentine watched from the park's broadcast booth. Warren Stephens watched from his luxury box behind home plate. Tulsa pitcher Jon Asahina, whose skull had been fractured by a batted ball on the same field three months earlier, watched from the dugout. And 28-year-old Tino Sanchez, whose father had seen a ball kill a man years before, who himself had hit Rockies manager Clint Hurdle in the face with a ball during spring training in 2003, cracked the line drive that left Coolbaugh dead of a crushed left vertebral artery.
Six weeks after Coolbaugh's death, the 11-year career of Cardinals outfielder Juan Encarnacion ended when a foul ball hit by teammate Aaron Miles crushed his left eye socket as he stood in the on-deck circle at Busch Stadium. That November major league general managers approved rules that require base coaches at all levels of pro ball to wear helmets on the field and to stay within the coach's box until a struck ball has passed. According to MLB's Dan Halem, standardizing or expanding the use of protective netting in ballparks was not considered.
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