Should MLB teams expand protective netting?

Wednesday’s incident in Houston has intensified discussion of a topic that was already hot – extending the netting at MLB games.

The injury sustained Wednesday night in Houston by a four-year-old spectator struck in the face by a foul ball has renewed a long-standing debate over whether MLB teams need to extend the protections offered by netting.

The young girl was carried from her seat just beyond the visitor’s dugout at Minute Maid Field after being injured by a foul ball hit by Chicago Cubs outfielder Albert Almora Jr. No formal updates have been provided regarding her condition.

The debate over the extent of netting that should be provided in ballparks goes back more than a century, but it has intensified in recent years due to a spate of well-publicized incidents. For much of baseball history, teams only erected netting to protect a fairly narrow area of seats directly behind home plate in the belief that most fans objected to expanded netting as obstructive to their view of the game.

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But prior to the 2018 season, MLB mandated that teams expand netting at least to the end of the dugouts. That step followed the injury of another child in an incident similar to the one involving Almora, this time at Yankee Stadium. Even that mandate did not help Linda Goldbloom, who was killed when struck by a foul ball last year at Dodger Stadium. A 2014 Bloomberg study estimated that about 1,750 fans annually sustain some sort of injury when struck by a ball at a major league game. That’s more than the number of batters hit by pitches each season.

In the wake of the Almora incident in Houston, there has been something of a drumbeat call in the news media and among players for further expansion of fan safety precautions. The New York Times and Washington Post have both carried articles questioning whether baseball’s recent steps go far enough, and USA Today’s Bob Nightengale authored a commentary Thursday calling on fans to demand extended netting. Quoting MLB team executives, Nightengale said it is the fans who have raised the loudest objections, those being based on fears of obstructed views or the inability to catch a foul ball.

Players appear to be fully on board with the idea. “When (his son) comes to the game, he watches from inside,” Boston Red Sox pitcher David Price told reporters Thursday. Baseballs, he said, “are coming off bats harder than ever.”

An article written by Nathaniel Grow and Zachary Flagel, respectively a law professor at the University of Indiana and a student at Duke University, and published last year in the Law Review of the College of William and Mary, looked at the history and potential for change in what is colloquially known as the “Baseball Rule.” That is a legal dictum which since 1913 has protected teams from liability due to injuries sustained at baseball games under the doctrine of Assumed Risk.

That doctrine imposes on spectators, rather than teams or players, the responsibility for injuries they sustain while attending events at which it is known or should be known that projectiles struck at high speeds in sometimes random directions are integral to the event.

Since 1913, legislators in four states – Illinois, Arizona, Colorado and New Jersey – have written the “Baseball Rule” into law, codifying protections to teams playing in those states.

The authors suggested, however, there is good reason to consider the potential that changing circumstances will prompt courts to amend or abandon that “rule.”

Those reasons include generally decreased distances in new ballparks between players and fans, and the increased velocity with which balls are entering stands, both reducing reaction time. Unspoken in the article – and not a factor in the Almora incident – was the reality that many fans bring additional distractions in the form of cell phones and other personal electronic devices with them to the park. Those distractions also contribute to decreased reaction times.

“Fans today are sitting 20 percent closer to the field than they were when the legal doctrine was first established,” the authors found. That alone leads to reduced reaction time.

The article calls on future courts or legislatures “to reject the Baseball Rule and instead hold professional baseball teams liable for spectator injuries.” This change, it said, would “incentivize teams to implement the most economically efficient level of fan protection (presumably wider netting) in their stadiums.”

That would be fine with many players. “I want to put a net around the whole stadium,” Almora told the Chicago Tribune.