So put in retractable nets; have them down before the first pitch, after the final out, and during umpire conferences.
This. The way bats are shattering lately it’s just a matter of time before someone is impaled on a shard, and being aware and getting your hands up in time won’t help a bit in that situation. You want to see decreased attendance? Wait until a kid is seriously injured by a bat. Moms all over the country will boycott baseball in a heartbeat.
Get nets in and be pro-active about it.
Is there one? 'Cos I’m far too lazy to start one of my own.
There! you see? The DH rule has made ME lazy! And I don’t even PLAY baseball any more! 
Seriously, I don’t have strong feelings one way or another about behind-the-dugout netting. I can say, however, that I’m not a fan of paying extra for the thrill of exposing myself to missile hazards. I would not be surprised to learn that I am NOT alone in this.
I say no nets. I will not sit behind one. If the net is in my field of vision, that seat is useless to me.
If there is no net, I will take the risk. Let ME make that decision.
You will always have that decision. The seats in the 2nd deck or in the outfield will not have nets under any proposal out there. You have those choices.
I’m okay with more netting. I’ve sat behind it and, really, you don’t notice it after awhile.
You don’t notice when the 150 mph baseball doesn’t bean you between the eyes?
Just for the record, the risk of reported injury at a MLB game appears to be 23.7 per million attendees according to a study quoted by Bloomberg:
Those figures include fans and stadium employees injured by foul ball, home run, batting practice balls and flying bats or pieces thereof. Expressed as a percentage, that’s a 0.0024% of any particulat fan being injured during a given game.
And there we go. Putting up nets with these little numbers is entirely overkill.
Growing up, my dad shared season tickets with other people at Veterans Stadium, Philadelphia. For 7 years we sat in section 312, near the back about 5 or 6 rows from the concourse. This is mid level, above the third base line above the Phillies dugout. I attended about 30 games a year.
Never, not one time, did anyone in my family or the other families we shared the tickets with ever caught a foul ball or was hit by one. There were plenty of foul balls that went over us, in front of us, next section to us… The nets some posters are suggesting would be right there for all those games. I would’ve told my dad to get rid of the tickets.
A 9 year old bat boy was seriously injured by a bat and died at the hospital later during the NBC World Series this year. No one seems to have boycotted in response. Although the NBC has banned under 18 year old bat boys, at least temporarily.
http://ksn.com/2015/08/04/grieving-father-praises-team-as-players-honor-fallen-bat-boy/
Pretty sure that fatality was the result of an on-field accident. The 9 year old was serving as a bat boy and was struck by a player who was doing a practice swing, unaware that the bat boy had walked into his immediate area.
Sadly, fan protection nets would not have eliminated this incident.
Don’t put in nets for that, get rid of the maple bats. Those things shatter much worse and more frequently than the ash ones.
There’s a world of difference between sitting in the lower deck of a newer park near the dugouts and being in the midlevel deck of one of the former cookie-cutter multipurpose stadiums of the 1970s. The lower deck is the only area where you really need it, the fans have much more time to react and the ball is significantly slower when it gets to the upper decks.
Kids that age have no business being on the field. There’s a certain level of awareness that one hasn’t acquired at that age to be in such a hazardous spot.
FWIW - there are certainly more and less dangerous parts of a stadium, and more and less dagerous stadiums, but the study I cited encomapsses examples of each stadium type to arrive at the risk of attendance. It does not, however, break the data down by specific seats or sections. Even if the most dangerous part of the most dangerous stadium is 2 orders of magnitude worse than the overall average we’re still only talking about a one fifth of one percent chance of injury.
Just trying to establish some context. The serious injuries get a lot of attention, but they are rare.
But it’s clearly not a magnitude of 2 for the dangerous areas around/immediately behind the dugouts. It, although I have no data to assign a specific number, is far, far more dangerous to sit there than to sit in the outfield bleachers or upper deck.
Here is what I found with a quick search this morning. Sports Science is television series that airs on ESPN where they apply physics, sports medicine, anatomy, and other scientific principles to sports. Basically trying to show what scientific forces are at work.
According one of their episodes, a line drive leaving the bat of a major league hitter can easily be 120 mph. At that speed the ball travels 95 feet in 500 milliseconds. They picked 95 feet as the approximate distance a third baseman plays from home plate.
That means, again according to Sports Science, that from the time a ball leaves a pitcher’s hand, to the time it reaches the third baseman, less than ONE SECOND has elapsed.
Many people in this thread have said “just pay attention” like that is good enough.
Okay, time for a little sneak brag here. I was a damn good ball player. All-County in 4 years of high school ball, and All State in two of those years. Played three years of Division 1 college ball at a medium sized program. Didn’t play my senior year because I knew I need to graduate. No MLB was going to to take a flyer on a glove-first, mediocre hitting first baseman. Not enough HR power, although I hit for good average. I was a damn good fielder. Had a good instinct for the game. Hard nosed, never missed a game, always knew how many outs there were, etc.
So what, right? Here is the what. At first base I was probably around that same 95 feet from home plate that I referenced earlier, if i wasn’t covering a runner. Heck, if I was covering a runner, I was exactly 90 feet away.
I was surely watching the ball more closely than any fan, and I STILL got smoked a few times!! Smoked is what we called it when a line drive got on top of you before you could react. Sometimes they were near misses, sometimes you took one off some part of the body. I had some impressive bruises. I remember one line drive heading right at my head that i could not get my glove up fast enough for. I will never forget the whistling sound the seams on the ball made as it went past my left ear. Our catcher, who saw it from the perspective of home plate, said it sailed past my head with no visible gap between the ball and my head.
And again, I was an accomplished fielder. With a glove. Ready for the play. Baseballs are dangerous things.
Here is an article to add to our discussion.
No, their not. Perhaps getting shot in a Colorado national park is a “growing” problem, but how big is the problem, really. What is the actual risk? How many people visit the park and how many get shot? And don’t tell me that more people were shot this year without figuring out if attendance increased or decreased.
Baseball is very bad about quantifying the risk of getting hit by a batted or thrown ball - the best I can find is 1 in ~300,000. BUT the risk will go up or down based on seat location. Rather than “Don’t want to get hit by a baseball, don’t go a baseball game, right?”, one can go to a baseball game and not sit in lower field level seats.
As for automobiles, you are comparing apples to oranges. Automobiles aren’t a convenience for the vast majority of people. They are a necessity of modern life. Most can’t choose to alleviate the risk of driving (far riskier than getting hit by a baseball), so it makes sense to make it safer.
Rather than put up nets, let those without the ability to adequately estimate risk sit in those seats in decks 2 and above and in the outfield, and let those who understand the negligible risk of sitting close to the field and viewing the game unhindered continue to enjoy. I’ve sat behind netting - some people may forget it’s there. I never did.
I’m just trying to get my head around the fact that apparently there’s a baseball team called the Liberal Bee Jays. 
:D:D That one gets to you, doesn’t it. :D:D
I think it’s great that they are from the conservative state of Kansas.
Your quoting my responses in that post without the context of the original post I was replying to distort the meaning. Construct had made a very black/white statement saying if you don’t want the risk, then don’t go to a baseball game. I was responding with multiple examples of how that kind of thinking holds no water in a number of situations
And as for only letting people
sit close to the field, how on earth do you plan on going about that?
Cite on the world of difference? Section 312 at the Vet wasn’t really a separate level, it’s sloped upward, much like the current Dodgers stadium. If you want safety nets for the lower deck, they’d still be in my way at both stadiums I mentioned while sitting the same distance from the field. (And Dodger stadium has a lot of room between the foul line and the dugouts.)
Since the close seats are $350 bucks, the chances of someone thinking, “Hey, let’s go to my first baseball game so I can tweet everyone and play Candy Crush and occasionally glance at the game” is probably a little less.