Suppose I am playing softball at the softball field. If I hit a foul ball or a homerun, am I legally responsible for the damage? What about if I am at a university playing frisbee golf or ultimate frisbee and my frisbee hits a car. Am I responsible then? What about if playing golf and I hit a car? Does it make a difference if I am playing on an approved course/field? My state is Alabama if it makes a difference. Thanks!
Why should you not be liable?
To add a question on to this; Most of golf courses have signs in the car park like “parking at own risk” or “We accept no responsibility for damage from gold balls” do these signs have any legal standing.
If you are part of an official university-sponsored team (and I’m not talking about things like an intramural league among dorms), the odds are the team has insurance for such things. But in those cases, you would have a coach who was an employee of the school to answer such questions. And it appears you don’t.
Why would you imagine you aren’t responsible for paying for damages caused by you and your friends playing a game?
Why would he be responsible for damage caused by his teammates?
I don’t think I should be liable if some dumbass, as there inevitably is always at least one, parks 3 feet from the fence on the first base dugout where virtually all the foul balls go. I was curious how the law was and how it applied to other sports venues. Similarly, I have seen people park in the middle of actual frisbee golf courses where there is no legal parking. If they get hit, am I liable? And please, if you want to debate this about ethically if I should be, start a GD or PIT thread. I don’t want it dragged out here.
This would be negligence. If if you have a duty (to take reasonable precautions not not to break windows) that you breach (hitting balls towards parked cars) and it causes damages (broken window), you are negligent.
If the car was parked outside of right field 800’ from home plate, you might not be negligent, as no reasonable person would be likely to take precautions against a home run being that long. If you are playing street ball and it goes through the neighbor’s window, you are probably on the hook.
Note that most states have comparative negligence rules now, so the guy who parks his car outside the dugout or drives onto the field during an ultimate game might be on the hook for some of the damages. If it’s a 100$ window and he is 50% at fault, you will only pay him 50$.
Signs and the like don’t make much difference, though you could argue that parking in the lot is an implicit acceptance that the golf course isn’t responsible for damages. These cases vary widely by state. Even so, YOU might be responsible, even if the course isn’t.
The other comments in this thread about insurance and such seem correct.
Oh and as it applies to disc golf, a car parked on the course deserves a few dents from a driver.
If you caused the “injury” you are liable. There could be contributing factors to reduce the percentage of liability but you still remain liable, especially if the injured party has a better lawyer than you.
Thank you for answering the question ivn1188. The particular scenario I am thinking of is those who park next to softball fields. Realistically, damage from an ultimate disc or disc golf disc would really be minimal, if at all, from the distances you are likely to inadvertently hit one from. But a softball could cause considerable damage. Windshields can be hundreds of dollars and a smashed hood or trunk or something I don’t even want to guess. Thus, my concern for my liability. Does car insurance cover this sort of thing typically? Obviously it varies, but when I was younger we were playing baseball in our yard and hit a car passing by. Absolutely our fault and we were responsible. Our parent’s homeowner’s insurance paid for it.
Regarding negligence, I can absolutely see it if you are playing in your front yard. But at an approved sports venue? Shouldn’t those parking in the parking lot or even illegally parking immediately adjacent to said playing field be negligent or assuming the risk of parking there? Most laws seem to make sense when you think about them, but if the players on the field are negligent for hitting a foul ball 100 ft. into a parking lot, then the law in this case, IMO, doesn’t seem to make sense. Seems to me that the people are taking on the risk by parking so close (whether the person is parked legally or in “approved” parking spots).
Now that I think about it, I guess it makes sense in other areas such as hitting someone who is illegally crossing the road. Suppose you were driving the speed limit and someone crosses the road illegally and you don’t see them. I have heard of people being liable for injuries in those cases, but it somehow seems inherently wrong IMO.
Sorry I realize I said earlier I didn’t want to bring up the ethics or “rightness” of the law, but now I can’t stop myself. 
Well, take the case of the pedestrian crossing the road illegally, and the driver who hits him. The fact that the pedestrian is crossing illegally is not terribly relevant; the fact that he shouldn’t have crossed the road doesn’t give motorists a licence to run over him… Relevant questions are things like, did the driver see the pedestrian? If he didn’t, would he have seen him if he had been paying proper care and attention? Over the distance in which he saw, or should have seen, the pedestrian, could he have stopped or taken other evasive action? If the answer to that is “no”, is that because he was going too fast, given the driving conditions? (“He was not exceeding the speed limit” is not an answer to this question.) And so forth.
It is negligent to assume that everyone else will always obey all the rules, and you should carry out all your activities with an eye to the risk they pose to others, including others who might be breaking some rule.
So, the guy who parks near a place where softball is played risks getting his car hit. But he is entitled to expect that people who are playing softball will take reasonable care not to hit it. The softball player is the last person who has a chance to avert the accident, so he is the first person we look to when we want someone to blame. But he can seek to divert the blame back to the car owner for parking in a place where this was an obvious danger, and/or (if the facts are so) onto the property owner for designating a parking space in a place where there was a foreseeable and material risk of a ball strike.
For the record, hitting a golf ball while not on an approved course is illegal in New Zealand.
For the rest, to me if it is an “approved venue” that you are using for an “approved purpose” there SHOULDN’T be any liable (not to say that there won’t be, just that there shouldn’t be)
No chipping balls around your own back yard? Yipes! NZ scores a six in the Nanny State sweepstakes.
Where i play softball, some of the parking spaces are close enough to the field that a high foul ball could possibly hit a car. In six months playing at this field, i’ve seen maybe three or four close calls, but have never yet seen a car hit. This is partly because the parking spaces are still a fair way into foul territory, and slow-pitch softball tends not to produce too many really long foul balls. Also, the cage around the plate area tends to stop most foul balls anyway.
Anyway, whatever the legal responsibility, i think that anyone who parked his or her car in one of those spots and then expected to be reimbursed for a dinged fender from a foul ball would be a douchebag of the highest order. There is parking all over the area, with plenty of spaces well out of range of any possible harm, and if you park in the dozen or so spaces that are in range of the field, you should be prepared to take your lumps.
That’s not really much of a GQ answer, i guess; more IMHO.
A perhaps more interesting question is, what happens if you hit a foul ball and it strikes someone in the crowd? I am sure it has happened…what is the deal then? It isn’t like a baseball player can accurately predict or decide where the ball will be headed.
Many sports have this kind of liability. Basketball, car racing, tennis, volleyball, etc.
It may seem a little off topic with the question posed by the OP, but all in all, it is quite related. Any ideas? Am I liable for breaking a kids nose with a foul ball?
Of course having a law on the books, and actually enforcing it are two different things - but if you have ever been hit by a golf ball its understandable. Those things can do some real damage. A family friend once had her jaw broken by a ball (and that was on a course)
Same thing as hitting a car. There isn’t really a set of magic words or circumstances that lay out exactly where the blame lies.
It basically comes down to a jury or judge’s decision as to whose actions were reasonable, and to what extent each party is to blame. The real answer lies somewhere between aiming your throw at a crowd of people and having a freak gust of wind carry your ball to hit a person a mile away.
Does the hockey spectator expect that they will get hit with a puck because the plexiglass shattered? Should the stadium owner put up nets behind the uprights? Can the idiot parking right in front of the teebox expect golfers to avoid hitting his car? These are questions decided on a case-by-case basis, and the law really only provides guidelines as to the general standards we should apply.
I know it’s not really a satisfying answer, but I think it is a good one. Bright-line rules are easy and consistent, but reality is not often so tidy, and I think it is a good thing that the justice system leaves room for the ambiguities that real life brings.
Forgive my ignorance, but what kind of disc are y’all using for disc golf or “ultimate” disc games? Scaled down manhole covers?
From what I’ve understood to be a “Frisbee” (TM belonging to whoever), one wouldn’t do noticable damage to a car if you stood right next to the vehicle and flung it into the car as hard as you could. Are “ultimate discs” or disc golf discs that much more substantial that they could cause a car noticable damage at any distance?
Cheers,
bcg
Actually, not the same thing, usually. Since the spectator in such cases has usually purchased a ticket, there can be an alteration of liabilities as part of the contract. Thus, if you go to a major league baseball game (or a minor league game, for that matter), you will find that your ticket, or some other literature available at the time of purchase, advises you that foul balls and the like happen, and that you have to pay attention, and that you are assuming the risk of being hit by such a ball. This generally shifts the burden over to the spectator, as long as the team/stadium owner/operator have taken reasonable precautions against situations where even a reasonably prudent spectator cannot be expected to avoid injury (such as by putting up nets behind home plate and hockey end lines).
As for the OP, it will depend upon circumstances. If you are playing at a baseball diamond, and someone parks a car where foul balls are common, and you hit one and it hits their window, you can only be considered liable if you were “negligent,” that is, you did not take that care which we would expect of a reasonable person to avoid causing damage to things with your game. A finder of fact might well conclude that, if you are playing the game normally, and the expected happens (a foul ball behind first base, say), and that results in damage to a car, that’s not the result of negligence on your part. If, on the other hand, you are screwing around in some fashion, and the way you are goofing off leads to the possibility of that occurrence, that’s a different issue.
Take as an example to dissect the famous video of the ball hit for a home run in some minor-league game that hits the side window and smashes it on a car driving past the park beyond the left field fence. Is the hitter of the home run negligent? Probably not; he cannot take any due care not to have that happen short of not playing the game, which isn’t in his range of decisions. Is the driver negligent? Probably not; how could the driver expect that that would happen? And even if the remote possibility occurred to him/her, what would the driver be expected to do about it, avoid driving on a public street as needed because a game is going on? Is the owner of the park negligent? Very possibly; the owner of the park could certainly forsee that a car might get hit by a home run over that fence, because even though the chance on any individual home run is small, given the multiple times that balls will go over that fence, it might well be expected the owner would realize some car some day might get hit. The owner would be expected to put up a fence or netting or something to limit that possibility.
All of this, of course, is potentially limited by statute. Many states, for example, have statutes which purport to put the liability for property or personal injury damage from a golf ball onto the player. This is intended to shield the golf course owners from such claims, in order to avoid having golf courses close down under the threat of massive numbers of tort lawsuits. Of course, although the signs will tell you that YOU are liable for injury or damage, that doesn’t mean that general negligence rules don’t apply, unless the statute creates a strict liability, which most of them do not do.
I suppose this qualifies as a threadjack (apologies if it is), but of course a different set of principles would apply in the case of intentional acts by the batter. If a fan off the first base line were heckling the batter, and the batter deliberately hits a liner foul towards the heckler, the batter might well be found liable for any injury he’d inflicted on either the heckler or any nearby innocent fan.
ISTR a case where Ted Williams and the Boston Red Sox were sued because Williams got tired of some fan giving him crap, and (according to the lawsuit) Williams deliberately fouled off a screaming liner to the fan’s face. Somehow, you’ve got to wonder if that’s really possible (given how hard the task of hitting a baseball is, period), but if any player could do such a thing it’d have to be Teddy Ballgame.
Cheers,
bcg