For those fans who have been impacted by a foul ball injury, baseball is as far from apple pie as it comes. The reality is that serious injuries happen every year and nobody in power has addressed this threat to fan safety. Just as Big Tobacco concealed the risks of smoking, so has baseball for all of these years concealed knowledge of foul ball risks to fans.

At least 15 people were maimed by foul balls in 2019 at Major League Baseball regular season games, and an untold number of fans have been injured at the many more minor league ballparks where statistics are unknown.

At least 43 children were seriously injured by foul balls between 2008-2019 in MLB and the minor leagues. Most of them were hit in the head, some had fractured skulls, permanent brain injuries and other developmental impacts. Most of these 43 children were injured at MLB games. But consider the fact that the minor leagues play three times as many games in a season as MLB does, and you can quickly understand how there are far more opportunities for young children and fans of all ages to be injured by foul balls in the minor league ballparks.

What will MLB do if anything to prepare stadiums for Spring Training 2021? Based on my research, MLB did not deliver on fan safety promises made by Commissioner Rob Manfred, who said that netting would be extended “substantially beyond the end of the dugout” at all ballparks. However, when Spring Training commenced in the Spring of 2020, I discovered that 16 out of 30 MLB teams were hosting games at ballparks where netting did not extend past the dugout. Two years later, as Spring Training 2022 took place, 10 MLB teams were still hosting games in Cactus League and Grapefruit League ballparks with no safety netting to protect fans seated past the ends of the dugouts.

This entirely preventable epidemic of serious foul ball injuries to fans will continue to haunt Major League Baseball as long as basic precautionary measures are not taken to mandate comprehensive extended netting. Worse still, the problem in 2022 will remain even more precarious for fans at the minor league professional levels, where at least 44 ballparks are sorely lacking in adequate protective netting. 

We also know that most, and perhaps as many as 29, of the MLB stadiums have not adequately raised the netting vertically to protect fans seated in the loge areas, like the one where Linda Goldbloom was hit at Dodger Stadium, causing her death. 

It is clear that MLB has done next to nothing to safeguard fans throughout Major and Minor League Baseball. Certainly, the MLB teams have the resources to pay for extended netting for all of their minor league affiliates. 

MLB has had at least fifty years of opportunity and justification to be proactive and transparent about fan safety risks from foul balls. Why 50 years? In 1970, fourteen-year-old Alan Fish was killed by a foul ball that struck his head as he sat along the first base line at Dodger Stadium. More protective netting should have gone up immediately. MLB could have acted responsibly to protect fans from that day forward. It didn’t happen.

Most people don’t realize that serious foul ball fan injuries have been a regular occurrence all along. As detailed in my forthcoming book, in 2019 a fan was seriously injured by a foul ball on average every other week — 15 people were maimed in a 26-1/2-week regular season — and that’s just in MLB (nobody knows how bad the situation is in minor leagues because no data are compiled).  And that’s with all of the netting upgrades implemented from the start of the 2016 MLB season. 

Cover-up or scandal? What could the players’ union, broadcasters and baseball journalists have done about this hidden (and out in the open) crisis for a half a century? I’ll let the readers decide.

Most people attending a baseball game don’t understand the certainty of the danger – that it’s not if but when a fan will be maimed by a foul ball.

But MLB knows. And they’re withholding their knowledge of this threat to fans. In 2019, Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth wrote to MLB asking the league to supply the data on foul ball injuries and danger zones in stadiums. To date, nothing has been made public.

NBC News compiled data from first aid contractors working for only four out of the 30 MLB teams, and reported that at least 701 fans had been injured by baseballs from 2012 to 2019. NBC’s own research found an additional 107 injuries in that time period. That’s 808 foul ball fan injuries. Factoring in the other 26 MLB teams, that would come out to roughly 5,000 fan injuries over the same period. Keep in mind, these figures are only for MLB, and do not account for any of the fan injuries in the minor leagues where there are three times more games played.

Ask yourself, what government or regulated industry would tolerate that injury rate in any other aspect of commerce? 

Baseball fans have had to figure this out for ourselves. No government has come to the rescue, and professional baseball certainly hasn’t stepped up adequately to protect us. 

We must take it upon ourselves to fight for our safety.

It’s time to fix this problem once and for all, so that all fans can enjoy watching baseball in safety.