The Solution to Foul Ball Injuries

Protective netting.  One of the big questions in Major League Baseball, other than why aren’t the Cubs doing better with all of the talent they supposedly have, is fan safety and how far to extend protective netting down the foul lines.  It’s such a big deal that the U.S. Senators from Illinois, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, apparently having nothing more important to do with their time, sent a letter last week to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred asking for information about injuries at ball parks.¹

Before the 2018 season, MLB required all parks to extend the protective netting to ends of the dugouts.  With injuries this year, some parks are extending the netting even farther.  The White Sox have extended the netting at Guaranteed Rate Field² all the way to the foul poles.

Last week, Phil Rosenthal in the Chicago Tribune took the Cubs to task for not doing the same thing – or at least not making a commitment to doing the same thing.  The fact that Guaranteed Rate Field and Wrigley Field are different architecturally and that it may be harder to do it at the latter, didn’t seem to matter to Mr. Rosenthal.  But it’s always easy to tell somebody else to do something.

Still, until the netting is extended, or if it isn’t, there is something people, especially parents, can do to protect their kids and themselves from screaming foul balls hit down the line: DON’T SIT THERE.  With all of the ticketing software out there today, you can see where your seats are long before you get to the park.  If you’ve got kids or if you might not be paying full attention all the time (or if you’re old and your reflex time is down), sit someplace where a foul ball isn’t going to hit you.  There are plenty of seats where you aren’t going to get hit by a foul ball (or at least your chances are dramatically less), and some of them are lot a cheaper than those box seats down the line.  I understand that MLB needs to make things as safe as reasonably possible, but people need to do their part, too.  The first of which is: know where your seats are.  And when it comes to seats where you might get injured by a foul ball: DON’T SIT THERE.
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¹ This is the second letter Senators Durbin and Duckworth have sent to Commissioner Manfred in the last month and a half. 
² If somebody knows of a way to automatically change the reference to the name of the White Sox’s park here whenever it changes, which seems to happen not infrequently, please let me know.