In the wake of the disturbing news that yet another fan -- this one reportedly had been drinking, but that's an early report -- had fallen from the stands in a major-league stadium and died, I dashed off this missive:
For anyone who didn't notice, I was backhandedly referencing all the recent discussions about adding substantially more netting to protect fans in the lower deck, many of them prone to looking at giant video boards or playing with their smart-phones instead of, you know, that screaming line drive heading right toward them. Ain't technology great.
Still, nobody's been killed by a baseball in the last (nearly) eight full seasons, during which time more than 500 million tickets have been sold. I'm using that stretch of time only because Jeff Passan, usually as measured in his judgments as any of us, predicted eight seasons ago that someone would be killed by a baseball soon if something weren't done.
Well, nothing was done and nobody's been killed. Not yet anyway.
Still, it's a discussion worth having. I took a stab at that discussion back in June, and recently Jayson Stark took a more nuanced, well-reported stab.
Every time a pitcher gets skulled by a line drive, there's talk about ways to protect the next pitcher. Oddly, nobody ever suggests moving the mound a foot more away from the plate; instead the discussion is about protective headgear. Not much has happened, and nobody's been killed. In fact, a pitcher hasn't been killed by a batted ball in the history of modern major-league baseball.
Still, it's a discussion worth having and people are having it.
In the wake of 9/11 -- granted, it's been a long wake, but you can't tell me we're not still in the wake -- Major League Baseball has heightened what some experts call "security theater," even though not a single fan the in history of major-league baseball has ever been killed by a terrorist. Or even anyone like a terrorist.
Still, it's a discussion worth having and ... actually, apparently it's already been had, somewhere. And the fear-mongers won the day.
Saturday night, it looks like somebody drank a bunch of alcohol at a baseball game and fell to his death. If that's what happened, it wouldn't be the first time. And nobody's even counting how many times someone has drank a bunch of alcohol at a baseball game, then killed himself and maybe others while driving home. But the figure must run into the dozens and perhaps hundreds.
Maybe there's nothing to be done about that. But what's utterly striking is that while this is the discussion perhaps most worth having, no one is having it.
