Fan injuries at baseball games

That means the other 26 ballparks are largely unaccounted for in the report. Based on the numbers available, it would appear that the average MLB ballpark had around fan injuries from baseballs since At Dodger Stadium this summer , the netting behind home plate and along the dugouts was made 8 feet higher and extended an additional feet down the baselines, following several notable incidents over the last two seasons.

In August , year-old Linda Goldbloom died four days after she was hit in the head by a foul ball above the netting behind home plate at Dodger Stadium.

This season, a girl was hit in the head by a line drive beyond the netting down the first-base line, and a boy also was hit by a line drive at Dodger Stadium during batting practice this season. According to NBC News, the Dodgers are one of 13 teams that either have extended the protective netting at their stadiums this year or have committed to doing so by next season. Chuck Schilken is a multiplatform editor and sports writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Kuhl swings late and lines it Chaos ensues. Nearby fans swarm, hoping to snag the ball as a souvenir. Adam hurries to get help. Eric stays with Jay. Medical personnel put Jay on a stretcher. They whisk him into the bowels of Wrigley Field. He sees a face with his right eye. Jay is led to a garage-like room to wait for the ambulance, which takes him to the emergency room.

His contents are out! It was not until after midnight that he went into surgery. He spent three days in the hospital. His left eye socket was shattered, and he lost his iris and lens.

He had facial lacerations, a hole in his sinus and three broken bones in his jaw. His retina needed to be repaired. All told, Loos needed five surgeries. He bought a new car—a Buick Enclave—with updated safety features so that he could drive despite not being able to see with his left eye; multiple pairs of glasses; and an aluminum stick that he uses to hike—one of his favorite recreational activities.

The expenses added up. The accident left him in constant pain and blind in his left eye. His injuries were entirely preventable. These figures do not include those whose injuries occurred at minor league, independent league or amateur games. In recent years, MLB and its teams have taken some measures to make their parks safer. Several teams have added at least some additional netting since then, but currently, only six big-league parks have fully extended netting, from foul pole to foul pole.

Five other parks have netting that goes deep down the foul line, but not all the way to the foul poles, while 17 parks have nets that extend to the elbows, the area where the side wall changes direction and angles away from the field. Petersburg, Fla. SI reached out to all 30 clubs asking for statistics on foul ball injuries, but none provided them.

MLB also declined comment for this story. Some teams claim engineering challenges prevent them from running netting all the way down the lines. Balls are not hit directly straight on into that area from home plate. But with ballparks re-opened at full capacity this summer, fans across the country have returned to games, where once again foul balls are hitting them.

Two different fans on back-to-back days in June were struck by foul balls at Fenway Park, according to local news reports. The first, an unidentified woman, was hospitalized, treated and released , while the second, a man named Rob Redman, was hit in the forehead and fortunately left with nothing more than a bruise. For more than a century, baseball owners have had nearly automatic protection from lawsuits filed against them for foul-ball injuries because of a pair of legal rulings that created an exemption that has come to be known as the Baseball Rule.

But, a series of recent lawsuits—including one Loos filed against MLB and the Cubs—are threatening that previously ironclad immunity. At the same time, a group of injured fans are working with members of Congress to push for netting from foul pole to foul pole at every ballpark and the abolition of the Baseball Rule.

Together, these efforts could be what finally forces teams to act. Many people point to the fine print on the back of game tickets as the reason fans are responsible for injuries that happen to them at games. Except, this has little to do with the Baseball Rule. The written warning is a way for teams to cover their tracks for when the inevitable happens, but it carries no legal authority. Congress has never passed federal legislation protecting teams from liability. In all but four states, there are no laws that provide cover for teams sued over fan injuries.

Instead, the Baseball Rule is common law, meaning it was decided by the courts and has been upheld over the years as precedent. The two cases that first established it are more than years old.

At least fans around the country were beaned by foul balls and home runs, or injured scrambling for balls knocked into the stands, from to , NBC News concluded by examining lawsuits, news reports, social media accounts and data from stadium first aid stations.

Sowa needed surgery to fix a crushed bone above his right eye, and still has lingering side effects more than five years later.

In , MLB recommended that teams expand netting to run 70 feet down the foul lines from home plate, but few teams did so. When a little girl was clocked in the face by a foul ball rocketed off the bat of Todd Frazier at Yankee Stadium in , the holdouts fell in line for the season.

In , a year-old woman was killed by a foul ball that struck her in the head at Dodger Stadium. Being able to catch a foul ball that makes its way into stands can be a thrill for fans, but in many cases, those foul balls end up injuring fans. Debris from shattered bats, home run balls, and balls hit during batting practice have all been known to injure baseball fans. In , Bloomberg News did a study into reports of baseball fan injuries and found that approximately 1, spectators are injured by stray balls at major league baseball games every year.

This breaks down to be at least two injuries for every three games played. A separate investigation by NBC News in found at least reports of fan injuries at baseball games between and