Until recently, base coaches did not wear a helmet on the field. It took the tragic death of Mike Coolbaugh, who was the third base coach of the Colorado Rockies AA Tulsa Drillers, to institute that rule change.
In Major League history, only one player has been killed on the field of play. When Ray Chapman died in 1920 due to being hit in the head by Carl Mays, the MLB instituted a ban on the spitball, looking to make the game safer. Those players who threw the pitch were grandfathered in, but the change would be universal when the final spitballer, Burleigh Grimes, retired after the 1934 season.
It took another tragedy along those lines to force base coaches to wear batting helmets. We all knew the dangers of getting into the batter’s box without one, but the fact that the field of play would be a dangerous place as well was hammered home on this day in 2007. That day, Mike Coolbaugh, the hitting coach and third base coach of the Colorado Rockies AA team, the Tulsa Drillers, was killed when he was struck in the head by a line drive off the bat of Tino Sanchez.
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Coolbaugh would receive CPR on the field, and was rushed to a nearby hospital to attempt to save his life. The impact of the ball destroyed his left vertebral artery, which provides a significant amount of blood to the brain. Although he was essentially dead upon impact, Coolbaugh was officially pronounced dead at 10:47 PM that night.
That death caused a rule change to be made in the MLB. Three and a half months later, it was decreed that base coaches must wear a batting helmet when on the field, starting in the 2008 season. Had that rule been in effect prior to the season, Coolbaugh may well have survived that line drive.
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The death of Colorado Rockies minor league coach Mike Coolbaugh did not need to happen. With the rule change brought about after his tragic passing, hopefully this will never happen again.