If the netting had been extended down the base lines, would that have prevented those cases?
I lean towards no netting myself. I like to sit close and have a pretty strong phobia about being hit by a baseball, but part of the fun of a game is the opportunity to get a foul ball after it kills the guy next to you :), and snagging a autograph from a player.
HEAVY SIGH So in this thread (names withheld to protect the innocent) we’ve had appeal to authority, appeal to tradition, burden of proof, victim shaming… the only thing missing is appeal to emotion. Please, allow me:
Baseball players are notoriously creatures of habit and routine. Some good, some bad. The best amongst them are revered for consistency. No one (besides a sociopath) remains unaffected when a foul ball rockets off their bat and blasts someone in the face. Do you really want your star slugger who’s on a 25 game hit streak to hesitate for even a milliisecond when fighting off that inside pitch?
Nets are so archaic!
Better to put up a force field. The ball/bat enters, and is immediately imploded. A computer can track the trajectory of the ball or bat. Later, an employee of the ball park can give the ball or bat to the person sitting where it would have landed. Problem solved. No injuries, and there are souvenirs.
Never suggested otherwise. I have made no assertion either way about whether or not netting should be employed.
My argument was simply that it is disingenuous to claim that this is merely a question of “paying attention.”
I do. I like to take my camera and telephoto lens, and the net messes up the pictures. Either the autofocus works that you get a nice picture of the net, or you get distortion in the picture. These days we sit just far enough out that the net ends on line with home plate, so I can get a good picture.
However, I have a hard time spotting the ball coming my way. When just watching the game, I’ve had some hot ones come into my section and I never even saw them coming. So I am also a fan of nets.
Well, the Phillies are making the move and will install more netting after the end of the season. One down, twenty nine to go.
I’ll avoid the obvious cheap shot about the players needing protection from their fans and just say: Good for you, Phillies.
No. (Aangelica is my wife ftr, and I was sitting next to her when it happened.) Our seats are almost directly behind home plate, with full screening from the net. The injury was on a foul ball that rocketed straight back, off the upper deck facing, and came straight down onto the person’s head. The only way to prevent that with a net would be to run it all the way up to above the upper deck.
I look at this issue from a utility standpoint. The utility provided to fans by a net in additional protection is more than outweighed by the utility of allowing fans to interact with players for balls or autographs.
No player is going to sign autographs during the game, so that’s not really an issue.
I realize, as do most others in favor of more protection, that some form of netting extending along the baselines is not going to stop every injury, To stop every injury would require netting that is not realistic. But it’s disengenuios to argue that if you can’t stop every injury, you should not try to stop any.
I’m sure a hard foul back that ricochets off a facing and drops on someone is going to hut like a mother****er, but that ball has slowed dramatically by completely changing direction. That cannot be compared to the 100+MPH rockets flying into the stands around the dugouts.
It’s coming, just get used to it. If you insist that you will be less likely to buy those seats, that will be okay, because there will be someone else out there MORE likely to buy those seats.
One of the local beat writers for my hometown team, the Atlanta Braves. is very interactive on multiple social media sites. I interacted with him a few days ago, asking his opinion on protective nets along the baselines. His response was this:
[QUOTE=Dave O’Brien, Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
Should be done ASAP, and I think/hope MLB does it for next season
[/QUOTE]
Not soon enough for the fan who got it in the forehead last night (luckily, not bad enough to go to the hospital). Five rows back, just past the end of the existing netting. The commissioner may have been there to see it, too.
Offtopic: That is a horribly written article. Baseball is a sport, it doesn’t make decisions. Major League Baseball or MLB is making the decisions.
I don’t think so. People find all kinds of ways to believe it will never happen to them.
That’s just understanding risk. If something has a 0.002% chance of happening (that’s baseball, not monster truck rallies), then yes, I can safely assume it will not happen to me. I can also safely assume that I won’t be hit by lightning and that I won’t win the lottery. Despite the fact that crashes and disappearances dominate the news feeds, I can assume that my next flight will arrive at its destination safely. That does not mean it can’t happen, just that it is extremely unlikely.
You’re quoting a rather small percentage but when you take out the people in the upper decks, the people in the outfield, & the people behind the plate (a ball ricocheting off a luxury box & hitting you will hurt but probably has lost enough speed as to not cause serious injury.) the percentage is much higher. Therefore, sitting in the seats behind the dugout has a much higher chance of being hit with a shattered bat or a ball as I’d exclude people in the ‘safe’ seats.
From the general MLB thread,
Not the first time. Or the second. In fact, falls (usually drunken) would seem to be a much more serious danger than batted balls. Shall we have safety netting at all rails? Or just banish beer?
Depends on how you define a much higher chance. 0.02%, or 10x more dangerous, is still negligible. That would mean that only 2 out of every 10,000 fans in the dangerous seats, a significant fraction of the total seats, suffers an injury of any type. That could mean a simple bruise. Injury does not mean carried out from the stands on a stretcher.
But if you insist on nets, how about between the decks. After all, more people have died falling between decks than have died from being struck by baseballs. From a Slate article dated 26-May-2009:
Attending a baseball game and sitting in the lower deck by the dugouts simply is NOT a dangerous activity. But like every single thing we do every day, yes, there is a risk of getting hurt.
On preview: Dammit! Beaten by Peremensoe. :mad: 
It’s just going to have to be nets all the way down.
“This was the third fan death from a fall at Turner Field in eight seasons.”
So, three deaths from falls in 8 seasons in ONE friggin’ stadium versus 1 death in 150 years in all of Major League Baseball. Now we don’t know how many falls there were in total in all of baseball, but I’ll bet you Yankee season tickets that the rate of serious injury is much greater than being hit by a foul ball, even in the scary sections. If I were to spend money making the live baseball experience safer, I think I know where it should be spent.
Can’t we just swath the entire stadium with a thick layer of cotton wool or absorbent foam?
As a plus, they’d soak up the spilled beer.
I knew some would come in here and try to use the tragic fall of a fan last night to say “See, look, there is danger everywhere”.
I was at the game last night where this happened, although I was luckily seated no where near where the incident took place. Yes, this is the third death at Turner Field, but they all had very different scenarios.
[ul]
[li]3 years ago a fan fell/jumped in a concourse area, and it was subsequently ruled a suicide[/li][li]6 years ago a fan fell after drunkenly attempting to slide down a long metal stair railing.[/li][/ul]The fan last night was, according to early reports, intoxicated and sitting near the front row of the second deck. He became overly animated when an opposing player (A-Rod) was announced, and lost his balance and fell.
None of this has any bearing on the issue of line drives and broken bats flying into the stands near the dugouts. Yes, these were tragic events, and I do agree that you can’t bubble wrap the entire stadium to head off every possible danger. But if there are reasonable measures that can be taken, then we as a society should do so.
Perhaps the fan last night would not have died if the second deck railing were a foot taller? Maybe. But there I go again, making completely unreasonable suggestions.