The case is apparently going to trial in Helena, Montana:
Brandon Patch, 18, was pitching to a Helena Senators hitter, who was using an aluminum Louisville Slugger bat, when he was struck in the temple by the ball on July 25, 2003. Patch died at a hospital about four hours later.Debbie Patch’s attorneys argue the case is not a freak accident. Baseballs hit with aluminum bats, such as the one used in that American Legion game, only give pitchers milliseconds to respond in a defensive stance....
The ball that struck Patch was traveling at 99.8 mph, [Louisville Slugger attorney Rob Sterup] said. Nearly every home run hit with a wooden bat exceeds 100 mph, Sterup added.
According to the plaintiff’s attorneys, Patch’s death was caused by the defective and unreasonably dangerous product because the bat was designed and manufactured to allow the ball to be hit with such significant force as to endanger the safety of those playing the game. No warnings were given to adequately provide sufficient notice to users such as Patch of the dangerous propensities of these products, the suit alleges....
I haven’t yet been able to get any documents in the case, so all I have to go on is the newspaper article. Thanks to Interested-Participant for the pointer.
Bill says:
Bah.
wooden bats break on a regular basis in the major leagues.
baseballs hit with wooden bats may only give the pitcher milliseconds to react to the ball *and* any sharp pointy broken bat fragments.
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October 23, 2009, 4:21 pmSuzy says:
That’s a terrible shame about what happened to the boy, but I can’t see how this is even remotely the fault of the bat manufacturer.
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October 23, 2009, 4:23 pmSuperSkeptic says:
The ball that struck Patch was traveling at 99.8 mph, [Louisville Slugger attorney Rob Sterup] said.
I’d like to know how he knows that.
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October 23, 2009, 4:28 pmJohn Jenkins says:
I assume this means Montana tort law doesn’t include assumption of risk?
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October 23, 2009, 4:28 pmBenjamin P. Hayek says:
Remarkable. I would very much be interested in reading any rulings denying summary judgment you can locate or link on this, EV.
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October 23, 2009, 4:40 pmCornellian says:
Sounds like it should have been dismissed on summary judgment. You don’t have to warn people about things everyone already knows or should know. My guess is the judge wanted the jury to take the responsibility for dismissing it because it’s a fatality case.
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October 23, 2009, 4:47 pmguest890 says:
Pitches are often captured on high-speed camera, so there may be a video recording of the incident.
If they were using a 150 fps camera, and it took 62 frames for the ball to travel from the bat to the pitcher, then the average speed would be (60.5 feet) / (62/150 seconds) = 99.8 mph.
Of course, this results in a time of about 413ms, which is somewhat at odds with the oddly-specific claim that “Patch only had about 376 milliseconds response time.” So I don’t know for sure, but the above is my guess.
(FWIW, Suzy summed up my feelings on this pretty well.)
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October 23, 2009, 4:49 pmDr Patent says:
guest980:
You’re likely on to the general idea for how the speed was calculated. You likely can make the reaction time work when you realize that by the time the pitch is released, the pitcher is 3 to 5 feet closer to the plate than than the rubber.
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October 23, 2009, 4:59 pmpgepps says:
Yes. Very sad. Foremost, that a young man died in a sporting accident. But also that a family’s grief and a community’s weakness are being manipulated in such a crass way by a lawyer, and that a judge permits it to go on. The latter is sad and disgusting.
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October 23, 2009, 5:04 pmDeezRightWingNutz says:
The pitcher is standing closer than 60’6″ to the plate after he releases the ball. Plus, the ball may be batted before or after it gets to the front of the plate. Assuming response time is the total time to get out of the way, and not the time needed to realize that you need to get out of the way, .376 seconds x 99.8 miles/hour x 1 hour/3600 seconds x 5280 feet/mile = 55 feet.
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October 23, 2009, 5:06 pmDotar Sojat says:
Watch for the class action.
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October 23, 2009, 5:11 pmThorley Winston says:
IANABF but it seems to me that if a fan attending a baseball game assumes the risk of getting struck by a foul ball, a player assumes an even greater risk, particularly the pitcher.
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October 23, 2009, 5:14 pmSteve says:
This reminds me of the McDonald’s coffee case, in which the issue was not whether everyone knows coffee is hot, but whether coffee can be unreasonably hot notwithstanding everyone’s understanding of the risk.
Of course, since most people seem to think the McDonald’s case was the most frivolous lawsuit in history, it’s not surprising that they have a similar opinion of this case. I don’t really see a reason why it shouldn’t go to a jury, myself.
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October 23, 2009, 5:19 pmAdam B. says:
There is plenty of research out there on the increased danger of alumnimum bats versus wood, given the relative speed at which the balls leave the bat and larger “sweet spot” on the bats, which is why the NCAA has imposed restrictions on bat dimensions and composition and many leagues have banned metal bats. Exit speeds are supposed to be limited to 97 mph.
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October 23, 2009, 5:19 pmDjDiverDan says:
I don’t pretend to be a products liability lawyer, but I was under the impression from law school (yes, a long time ago) that, in order to prevail in a case like this, where the supposedly “defective” product (i.e., the bat) worked precisely as intended, you are required to show that the manufacturer knew of an alternate design that would work as well, was safer (i.e., would not have caused the same injury), and not impose an unreasonable cost. Without the same or similar standards for tort liability, we’re really just talking about strict liability — if anybody ever gets injured with any product, even if it is used and performs precisely as intended, then the manufacturer is the insurer. Under those circumstances, everything we buy would become more expensive, as every manufacturer (if it wants to stay in business) has to price it’s products to include the cost of what amounts to “no fault” liability insurance.
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October 23, 2009, 5:19 pmbob says:
This suit is perhaps not as surprising as it may seem at first.
A significant reason why aluminum bats are not allowed in the the majors is because they would result in many more pitchers being injures — and also increase home runs, of course.
Aluminum bats are carefully engineered to really “pop” the ball and serious players can tell when a bat has been used so much that it has lost its “pop”.
There are obvious assumption of risk problems, but at the same time there is no reason why aluminum bats have to produce the ball speed that they do.
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October 23, 2009, 5:23 pmAdam B. says:
For instance:
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October 23, 2009, 5:24 pmepluribus says:
So a lawyer files a suit in behalf of clients who have suffered a horrendous loss and this is “manipulation”? Not only “manipulation,” but “sad and disgusting manipulation”? Do you think the lawyer should have said, “Yes, you have suffered a horrendous loss. I could take this to court and wait for the decision of the judge or jury. But I’m going to save them the trouble and make the decision for them. You lose.” You do know the difference between the roles of the lawyer and the judge and the jury, I hope.
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October 23, 2009, 5:27 pmDjDiverDan says:
It can’t be Louisville Slugger’s fault — the injury never would have occurred if the League had been playing with a Nerf Ball — Sue the Manufacturer of the Ball!
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October 23, 2009, 5:33 pmL8 says:
State court judges in Montana are reluctant to grant summary judgment motions. I’m guessing that’s why this case is going to trial. The content of tort law in Montana may be fine.
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October 23, 2009, 5:35 pmKenB says:
The next time I shoot a few rounds of sporting clays with my 12 gauge, perhaps I should assert a cause of actions for the bruises on my shoulder.
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October 23, 2009, 5:35 pmAnym_Avey says:
When I was a small sprout, a grade-school friend of some relations was pitching during an informal recess game and got struck and killed by a line drive. According to express school policy, the children were not allowed to supply baseballs for such activities, only softballs, which made the event doubly tragic.
The family — who had suffered an even more horrendous loss than this one, since the victim met his end at a plain violation of the schoolgrounds rules and wasn’t even old enough to understand the risk he was taking — did their grieving out of court. Apparently, according to one Ms. Debbie Patch, the real story is that they weren’t smart enough to realize that instead of losing a son, they had gained a lottery ticket.
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October 23, 2009, 5:45 pmJRL says:
epluribus:
I don’t think the issue is knowing the difference between lawyers and juries, but the difference between accidents and torts. This accident just isn’t a tort.
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October 23, 2009, 5:54 pmDan Simon says:
There are all sorts of ways a society can help the victims of unfortunate accidents, illnesses or other misfortunes. Government programs, insurance systems, employer assistance, charitable organizations–most societies use some combination of these, and many others. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, and reasonable people can differ on the best approach.
The one thing I hope we can all agree on is that it would be utterly insane for any society to rely on a system in which the victim hires a professional whose job is to find a third person who’s (a) remotely connected to the misfortune and (b) very rich, and then to try to persuade twelve other people that the third person should compensate the victim–and give half as much again to the professional, to boot.
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October 23, 2009, 5:55 pmantiquus says:
guest890 said:
If they were using a 150 fps camera, and it took 62 frames for the ball to travel from the bat to the pitcher, then the average speed would be (60.5 feet) / (62/150 seconds) = 99.8 mph.
First, this is a specious (mathematical) argument. Neither of the 150fps or 62frames values was presented in the OP, so you are just backing-out the result of 99.8mph for convenience of the argument.
A more reasonable camera would be an off-the-shelf model, at 24 or 30fps. The margin of error is +/- one frame, or 3–4%, so a value of 99.8mph estimated in this way could actually be as low as 96mph.
Since this is a hair-splitting argument anyway, my 96mph estimate could be just as valid as the 99.8mph suggested. Get some engineering sense in your pea brains, and you will realize that these are, within reason, the same value. If you get hit by either one, the results will be indistinguishable.
And, yes, epluribus, this is manipulation of the masses who are ignorant of the mathematics and physics involved. The lawyer is asking for pedantic interpretation, like my preteen children used when explaining why chores weren’t done, and involves the same contemptuous mentality. For another example, refer to Monte Python’s Holy Grail scene about the witch.
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October 23, 2009, 6:01 pmAnderson says:
Adam and Bob have good points, and I can think of a couple of Mississippi counties where a jury might find for plaintiff, but color me skeptical that a Montana jury will do so.
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October 23, 2009, 6:04 pmAngus says:
Worst. Argument. Ever. Do a lot of pitchers get hit in the head with home run balls?
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October 23, 2009, 6:10 pmd-berg says:
This being a legal blog, we can analyze the case all night long and then some, but this is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with legal system in US. The lawyer is not a compassionate samaritan here, he is looking to make a profit by exploiting a loss of human life that was accidental and nobody’s fault. Your argument is the same that ex-President Bush advanced when he signed campaign finance law: he thought it was unconstitutional, but left it up to Supreme Court to render judgment and actually uphold the Constitution.
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October 23, 2009, 6:20 pmRandy says:
“There is plenty of research out there on the increased dan ger of alum n i mum bats ver sus wood, given the rel a tive speed at which the balls leave the bat and larger “sweet spot” on the bats,”
Then the fault, if any, lies with the person who choose to use an alum bat versus a wooden one.
Baseball games regularly calculate the speed of the ball and post it on the monitor. IT must be fairly easy to do so as it is done often. You folks just need to get out more and eat some ballpark franks.
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October 23, 2009, 6:21 pmLe Messurier says:
“Apparently, according to one Ms. Debbie Patch, the real story is that they weren’t smart enough to realize that instead of losing a son, they had gained a lottery ticket.”
No, the Patches may make a gain off of this tragedy, but the real and big winner of the lottery ticket is the attorney. For what are of course only eleemosynary motives, he not only wins the lottery ticket here but may have found a new career in high dollar ambulance chasing. Or should i say bat chasing. What sweet and caring fellows he and his ilk are.
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October 23, 2009, 6:22 pmCheckEnclosed says:
Two things: 1) if the theory is that the bat is a defective product because it is unreasonably dangerous, then it is a strict liability tort, and assumption of risk is likely unavailable as a defense;
and b)when the first suits against gun manufacturers came out (alleging that they were defective because they were too good at killing people (or, in the case of “saturday Night Specials” too good at killing people cheaply))I figured it was only a matter of time before someone claimed that a knife was defective because it was sharper than it needed to be — but the baseball bats came first(worng again — Doh!).
Note that when cigarettes came out that were better at delivering nicotine without as many additional“tars”, it wasn’t that hard to get a bunch of folks to buy into the idea that the more effective nicotine delivery system was actually dangerous, evil, or even defectively designed.
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October 23, 2009, 6:23 pmd-berg says:
What is functional difference between line drive that goes over the fence for a home run and same speed line drive hit at the height of pitcher’s head? A few degrees in vertical angle, otherwise it is the same home run ball
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October 23, 2009, 6:23 pmKazinski says:
Worst. Counter. Argument. Ever. Home run balls are not generally the hardest hit balls unless the batter has an uppercut swing. The hardest hit balls are line drives hit on the button. Like the ball that killed the poor kid. The home run example is just to show how common 100+ MPH balls are.
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October 23, 2009, 6:30 pmSandy MacHoots says:
Everyone who plays baseball knows that the ball comes faster off an aluminum bat than off a wooden bat. They’re not used in pro baseball for that reason — somebody can get killed when, say, Ryan Howard hits a 98 mph fastball. Metal bats are used in amateur baseball because people don’t usually hit them that hard. Kids (up through college) like aluminum bats because they hit the ball harder and farther than they can with wood, and because they’re much cheaper over the long run.
The NCAA has a BESR (bat exit speed ratio) test to which bats must conform to be used in college play. The people who set the standards have to balance safety issues against the fact that the whole point of a bat is to hit the ball hard. (Hollow plastic would be much safer but the game wouldn’t be quite the same.) They also have to take into account cost — most amateur teams these days couldn’t afford to play with wooden bats, since they break so frequently. Maple bats don’t break as often as ash, but they’re more expensive and more dangerous when they do break. Composite wood and bamboo bats break less often, but (like aluminum) cause the ball to be hit harder. Everything is a tradeoff.
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October 23, 2009, 6:33 pmKazinski says:
Its really easy to do if you have a special 3 camera system set up and calibrated in every stadium. That generally isn’t a feature at high school fields.
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October 23, 2009, 6:36 pmguest890 says:
Yes, I am; I never claimed otherwise. Note that the entire sentence begins with the word “if.” It’s a hypothetical, and I closed the mathematical part of my post with “I don’t know for sure, but the above is my guess.”
It’s true that most consumer-level point-and-shoot cameras capture at roughly 30fps, but as I said, it’s not unreasonable to think that they might have a better camera set up to analyze pitches.
Your random ad-hominems aside, of course getting hit with a 96mph ball is indistinguishable from getting hit with a 99.8mph ball. But the specific claim was 99.8mph, not 96; SuperSkeptic was asking how they could get such a specific number, and I gave a potential explanation. Could I be wrong? Sure. But it seemed plausible.
[There are plenty more pedantic bones to pick with this number, from imprecision in measurements of both distance and time to the effects of air. But I’m not answering how fast the ball was going myself; I’m explaining how they might have gotten the 99.8mph value they claimed.]
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October 23, 2009, 6:44 pmDavid Schwartz says:
150 frames per second and 300 frames per second are reasonably common frame rates used for high-end cameras to record sporting events. Fox shoots the Super Bowl at 300, to give a 10X instant replay when run at 30fps. There’s lots of 300fps stuff on YouTube, so it can’t be that hard to get your hands on.
150 fps is the practical limit these days for commodity image sensors like those used in cheap digital cameras and consumer digital video equipment. So it’s popular with the littler guys.
I doubt the speed would have been cited as 99.8 if the uncertainty was on the order of 2 mph, but it’s always possible he wasn’t speaking precisely.
Also, it is often possible to interpolate frames. For example, if a frame shows the ball about to hit the bat, and the next frame shows the ball in the same spot, it likely hit the bat around halfway between those frames. If you’re careful enough, you can interpolate reasonably well, but it tends to give you only meaningless accuracy anyway. (Because the ball is in contact with the bat for a non-zero amount of time, among other things.)
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October 23, 2009, 6:48 pmJiffy says:
This means the bat makes only about a 7% difference in hit ball speed (and that’s the difference between the fastest and the slowest bats, the difference between the fastest and the average would be less). Since “Patch only had about 376 milliseconds response time,” using a slower bat would have given him at most only about 25 additional milliseconds. I wonder how much difference that would have made.
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October 23, 2009, 6:48 pmOSU3L says:
I do not think any suit on this issue should prevail but I would think the strongest argument is against the league.
The league regulates which kind of bats are allowed and the reason metal bats are uses is $. Metal bats rarely break and take a long time to wear out—wooden bats are much more expensive over the course of a season. Suing the bat manufacturer here is not much unlike suing the hitter.
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October 23, 2009, 6:57 pmSplunge says:
I would expect ball speed to be measured by a cheap sonic or radar gun rather than dicking around with analyzing photographs.
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October 23, 2009, 6:58 pmepluribus says:
The lawyer is not a compassionate samaritan here, he is looking to make a profit by exploiting a loss of human life that was accidental and nobody’s fault.The lawyer’s job is not to be a compassionate samaritan, but to represent the client. Here he/she will do so in a lawsuit for damages. You have arrogated the role of judge and jury by saying the kid’s death was “nobody’s fault” and so the lawyer’s case is meritless. How do you know that? Do you know all of the evidence in the case? Do you know that the kid or his parents were aware when they went into the game that an aluminum bat, as opposed to a wooden bat, would be used? I am amazed by how many people show up on this legal blog ready, willing, and able to prejudge issues that they know little or nothing about. Lawyers are accustomed to suspending judgment until they know the facts. Good judges and good jurors do the same. Good internet posters ought to follow their example.
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October 23, 2009, 6:59 pmHoward Bowman, MD says:
Radar guns are cheap and available....
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October 23, 2009, 7:03 pmMLS says:
I am curious is ball manufacturers are getting a free pass in matters such as this? Not to make light of a tragic situation, it was after all a ball that caused this tragedy.
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October 23, 2009, 7:05 pmSplunge says:
using a slower bat would have given him at most only about 25 additional milliseconds. I wonder how much difference that would have made.
Quite possibly all the difference in the world. The difficulty here is that the human eye-brain combination has a certain lag time that it takes merely to process the visual information and recognize the approaching danger. IIRC, that is usually estimated to take about 250 ms. At that point a decision is made about what to do and motor action is initiated. This happens very fast, because it does not require conscious thought. We duck when something comes at our heads, completely instinctively, and long before we realize what we’re doing and why.
Once motion is initiated, it’s a question of how fast the body (in this case the head) can move. If a pitcher can throw a ball at 100 MPH, it follows that he can make his own arm move at 100 MPH. Let’s assume he can’t do as well with his head, and the speed of his head is limited to, say, 50 MPH. A baseball is 3 inches across, I believe, and a man’s head about 8 inches, which means the boy’s head needs to move at most 7 inches before the ball misses him. 50 MPH is 0.88 inches per millisecond, that is, the boy’s head would need only 8 ms to move out of the danger zone. Double that to account for the fact that his head needs time to accelerate from rest. So once he starts moving his head, he can get out of the way of the baseball very fast indeed, within 20 ms, say.
But the key question is: how soon does he start moving his head? If indeed he started after 250 ms, he’d probably be fine. If he doesn’t even start until 450 ms, he’s doomed. And it’s a sharp cutoff time. Before that time, he doesn’t move at all. A mere 20 ms after that time, he’s safe.
I suspect the actual cutoff “reaction” time varies among individuals, and I also suspect, given the comments above about the concerns of the majors et cetera on pitcher injuries, that the average reaction time is probably surprisingly close to the time it takes a hit ball to travel from home plate to the pitcher’s mound. Indeed, it may be that that’s exactly why the pitcher’s mound is where it is: it’s as close as the pitcher can safely get to home plate, for the average pitcher, the average batter, the average bat and ball, back when the game was invented. That might argue that the distance should be increased now that Al bats are used, or perhaps the bats should be banned in general.
As a society if we’re willing to have such things as Consumer Financial Protection Agencies, who will warn you that your mortgage loan note actually means what it says about the penalties for nonpayment, I’m not sure we have much moral standing to be criticizing the family in this case.
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October 23, 2009, 7:13 pmepluribus says:
When somebody is shot to death, would you say that the bullet caused the tragedy and not the gun? The ball didn’t cause this death until somebody hit it with an aluminum bat.
The manufacturer of the bat isn’t a compassionate samaritan either. Last time I checked, the bats were manufactured by a company looking to make a profit. Is it bad when a lawyer makes a profit, but not bad when a bat manufacturerer does so–and arguably producing an inherently dangerous product?
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October 23, 2009, 7:27 pmcboldt says:
– then it is a strict liability tort, and assumption of risk is likely unavailable as a defense –
I believe assumption of the risk is available to the defense, even in a strict liability case. Did (now dead) plaintiff a) voluntarily (subjective) and b) knowing (subjective) the downside risk (here, “death by impact”), c) unreasonably (an objective determination, by the finder of fact) assume the risk?
I’m curious how many of these death by impact with baseball cases happen a year; and then, a breakdown by type of bat.
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October 23, 2009, 7:33 pmVisitor Again says:
epluribus, don’t waste your time. For some of those here, tort liability for defective products is theft. It’s evil because it cuts into profits. They want the good old days back, when manufacturers could do as they pleased and the poor folks just had to suck it up.
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October 23, 2009, 7:38 pmBrett Bellmore says:
The lawyer’s other job is to understand the difference between a legitimate and a frivolous lawsuit, and refuse to be party to bringing the latter. Lawsuits such as this shouldn’t just be dismissed, the lawyers who bring them should be sanctioned for barratry.
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October 23, 2009, 7:41 pmJiffy says:
Splunge:
I think you’ve overestimated both the speed at which a person could move his head in ducking out of the way (try throwing a ball out of your mouth by snapping your head if you think head speed can aproach even 50% of arm speed) and the acceleration he could achieve (0–50 in under 20 milliseconds?), but I take your point: it’s conceivable that if the pitcher began moving his head out of the way at 376 milliseconds (and not merely 20 milliseconds later) an extra 27 milliseconds could have made a difference. But your post convinces me that the chances of that are vanishingly low.
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October 23, 2009, 7:41 pmmf24 says:
Could the defense argue that Patch contributed to the accident? If he hadn’t thrown the ball so hard, maybe it wouldn’t have come back to him as quickly.
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October 23, 2009, 7:44 pmLe Messurier says:
The lawyer may not be a “compassionate samaritan” but he sure as h...l is exploiting a loss of human life to make a profit and that is disgusting, but that’s the price we as society pay to have such great people running around.
Or that they would be using bats? Actual BATS? Wooden or Aluminum? How uniformed of them. How negligent as parents they are! See? There’s the defense for the bat makers. “We aren’t at fault. The parents are because they didn’t know and should have known what their child was doing.” Makes as much sense as the plaintiff’s probable claim. The wooden vs aluminum bat argument is really stupid, but it may just win in our legal system.
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October 23, 2009, 7:45 pmBrett Bellmore says:
The product wasn’t defective. It didn’t come apart in the batter’s hands, catch fire, explode or send the ball off in a random direction, it functioned exactly as it was supposed to. Some fraction of people hit by balls off of properly functioning baseball bats ARE going to be injured, or die.
If I hit you over the head with a brick, that doesn’t make the brick defective. That a product isn’t perfectly safe to use doesn’t make it defective. Life is inherently hazardous.
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October 23, 2009, 7:47 pmOff Kilter says:
“If a pitcher can throw a ball at 100 MPH, it follows that he can make his own arm move at 100 MPH.”
Really? That’s not at all obvious. I think it’s false. Any physicists willing to chime in?
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October 23, 2009, 7:47 pmphonon says:
Actually, the faster pitch will result in a ball with about 8.1% more kinetic energy AND less time for the pitcher to duck/protect himself. So it in fact can mean the difference between a fatal or nonfatal hit.
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October 23, 2009, 7:47 pmKeithK says:
Again, the product wasn’t defective. The fact that a ball comes off an aluminum bat faster than a wooden one is a feature, not a bug. Batters want to hit the ball as hard as physically possible.
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October 23, 2009, 7:56 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Product Liability Lawsuit Against Louisville Slugger, Because It’s Designed to Allow Hit Balls to Go Very Fast -- Topsy.com says:
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Brett Bellmore says:
The pitcher has no way to throw the ball faster than at least some portion of his arm, the fingers holding the ball, is traveling. Most of his arm will, of course, be traveling much slower.
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October 23, 2009, 8:04 pmDuracomm says:
Obviously the solution to the problem is to outlaw aluminum and wood bats and replace them with NERF bats and balls. Problem solved.
If the attorneys keep it up NERF bats may be the only ones available for purchase.
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October 23, 2009, 8:05 pmSplunge says:
Really? That’s not at all obvious. I think it’s false. Any physicists willing to chime in?
Sure. But I already did. So now you go ahead and explain your theory of how the ball accelerates after it leaves the pitcher’s hand.
Good grief.
Jiffy, your objections are interesting, and I would find it easy to believe I’m off by factors of two. But it hardly matters. Double my estimate for fudgy factors, and it still comes in at less than 50 ms. The point is that the critical factor is the relatively long reaction and threat-recognition time, and that there is a very sharp line between “doomed” and “scot-free” drawn at that line. That implies that the sensitivity of the boy’s fate to variations in how fast the ball got there could be exquisite. That is, it could easily be the case that an extra 25 ms would have saved him.
What I’m trying to dispel is the notion that his fate varies smoothly with time, as it would if he were, say, running away from an angry bear. If the bear catches you and eats you when you’re running 15 MPH, the situation may not get much better at 17 MPH (the bear only gets to swat you a few times, taking off much skin and flesh), and not become “scot free” until you hit 22 MPH (or definitely in excess of a bear’s sprint speed). That would be the situation perhaps if what dominated the baseball situation was the speed at which the boy could move his head. But that’s not the case.
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October 23, 2009, 8:10 pmAnthony says:
The ball isn’t going to be moving faster than the fastest-moving part of his arm (fingertips), but speed drops by a lot over the length of of the arm. In any case, I’m unclear about why this matters, an average man is plenty strong enough to kill himself if he applies force wrongly. We’re wired to mostly avoid doing so, but that doesn’t work when we’re damaging other people.
As far as avoiding a blow, 1G of acceleration (which your head can certainly do, assuming you can lift your head while lying down) will allow evading a blow in 100–150 milliseconds (sufficient to move your head by 5-11cm, or 2–4.5″); the main reason it’s hard to dodge is that it takes a certain amount of time for your brain to process ‘hey, rapidly moving object coming my way, I should probably move’, and even a small time increase could be significant to that. However, if you really want to cut the risk to pitchers to negligible, you pretty much need to give them a helmet, mask, and breastplate (center torso hits have a small chance of causing cardiac arrest), like a catcher.
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October 23, 2009, 8:21 pmepluribus says:
I know you’ve prejudged the case and no amount of reason or facts will dislodge your prejudgment. But are you seriously arguing that the bat was supposed to propel the ball so fast and so hard that it would kill the pitcher? If not, how can you seriously maintain that it “functioned exactly as it was supposed to.” In this case, it functioned in such a way that it killed a kid. I kind of think the manufacturers would deny that it was exactly supposed to function that way. Or at least their lawyers will make that argument.
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October 23, 2009, 8:48 pmMalvolio says:
IANAP but even if you stretch the definition of “arm” to include the fingertips (the part that actually touching the ball), no, not quite.
Instead of a ball, imagine a bead on a rod. The rod is mounted on the shaft of the motor, like the blade of a fan. When the motor is switched on, the rod swings around and bead slides to the end of the rod and is slung out into air [ed: this actually sounds like a fun machine, shooting beads all over the room. mom: until you put somebody’s eye out!]
Assume the motor accelerates instantaneously (or that there is some mechanism to keep the bead in place until the motor is up to speed), that it spins at 60 RPM ‚and that the rod is one meter long. The tip of the rod is moving at 2π meters per second. If the bead starts at the end of the rod, it is immediately shot off, at that same 2π m/s.
But, and here’s the crucial thing, if at the start, the bead is a ways up the rod towards the center, the bead will have to accelerate down the length of the rod to get free and when it does, its velocity consists of the vector-sum of two components: the 2π m/s of tangential motion and the radial (outward) motion (which depends on how far from the end of the rod the bead started).
A baseball pitch works the same way: some of the speed comes from the tangential motion of the hand and arm rotating around the shoulder joint, some from the ball rolling down the fingers. For an even more extreme example, think about a jai-alai throw: the ball gains a lot of its speed from rolling down the length of the basket.
It was my understanding that there would be no math.
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October 23, 2009, 8:52 pmOren says:
Physicist here concurring with Splunge in the analysis — the boy’s fate depends critically on the speed because the lag is dominated by thinking, not moving.
Shortstops are almost twice as far from the batter as pitcher and regularly catch a 120+ MPH line drives.
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October 23, 2009, 8:55 pmOren says:
Yes. That is how the game of baseball is played.
If the ball leaves slow enough that contact with a skull wouldn’t be fatal (60-70mph?), then you are play softball, not baseball.
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October 23, 2009, 9:03 pmPintler says:
A ball with different characteristics would change the situation as surely as a different bat. The league could have insisted on softballs and AL bats as easily as baseballs and wood bats. The results you get depend on the ball and bat as a system.
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October 23, 2009, 9:04 pmBrett Bellmore says:
I am seriously arguing that a properly functioning baseball bat is supposed to propel the ball so fast that it would, some cases, kill the pitcher, if it hit the pitcher. Some people, after all, have thin skulls.
The baseball bat’s functioning ended when the ball left it. You might as well blame the ball for not being a nerf ball.
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October 23, 2009, 9:05 pmOren says:
Or the air for not being viscous enough, for that matter.
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October 23, 2009, 9:07 pm402A says:
What was the defective condition unreasonably dangerous? The bat did exactly what it was designed and manufactured to do, and it did it well.
And would a warning have done anything to decrease the risk? “Warning: this bat decreases the time the hittee has to react. Tell the pitcher to wear a helmet.” Note that any warning would have to be placed on the bat, irrelevant to the user, the batter, and distinctly un-useable to the victim, the battee. What could Louisville do for that apple of his mother’s eye 60 feet away?
Further, how could this danger be anything but open and known to any player?
The parents are to blame for letting their kid play in a league that allowed such bats.
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October 23, 2009, 9:12 pmodinbearded says:
Yes, a wooden bat might have hit the ball at a slower velocity. And perhaps the pitcher could have responded. Of course, he could also have moved his head in such a way so that a lower velocity hit could be fatal. Lot of ifs. And, if the suit is really about making the game safer, why isn’t the league a defendant? They were the ones with the ultimate responsibility for safety.
And, at the risk of sounding crass, what responsibility does the pitcher have for allowing the ball to be hit at such a speed?
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October 23, 2009, 9:42 pmLe Messurier says:
The parents are to blame for letting their kid play in a league that allowed
suchbats.There, fixed that for you.
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October 23, 2009, 9:46 pmgeokstr says:
Well, let’s do some more math.
Approx 800+ Division I/II/III college baseball teams, approx 250 pitches per game, 56 game schedule (assumption Duke is typical), that’s just over 11 million pitches per year, not counting playoffs, not including all others who use aluminum bats and hardballs (like high schools) in official teams or just pickup games.
So, 11 million+++++ potential swings of the aluminum bats, resulting in a handfull of deaths in a 20 year period.
Good for that judge and the lawyer. With such a scandalous death rate, it’s time to hold those greedy capitalist-roader bat manufacturers to account for their utter reckless indifference to the lives of children, for the sake of mere profit, after they’ve forced all those institutions and players to use them.
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October 23, 2009, 10:08 pmmischief says:
Yup.
Balls have killed lots of people.
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October 23, 2009, 10:10 pmOren says:
Deep pockets.
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October 23, 2009, 10:41 pmMichael Haas says:
Michael McNeil quoted “the belief was established that the formerly despised ius gentium, now so much enlarged, was really an approximation to the ius naturale, which mankind had lost sight of. It was the fate, therefore, of civil law to be gradually superseded by ius gentium as more of the ius naturale was recovered; and so the conception of natural law, as in philosophy, so in jurisprudence, had a simplifying, a unifying, and a levelling effect” in the Ayn Rand discussion recently.
As one who enjoyed playing baseball in his youth, I have been sorry to see the indiscriminate introduction of aluminum bats into youth baseball. When the kids are very small, these bats allow them to get into the game but as soon as they develop much strength they change it dangerously. There is a matador aspect to baseball but I agree with the commenter(s) above that the original dimensions make the wooden bats much safer. Americans have an emotional attachment to the game and history with it and I believe it would be different if the game were started de novo with aluminum bats, but the bat manufacturers have changed the game, and they should pay for the change they have introduced, the non ius gentium they have introduced between players.
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October 23, 2009, 10:45 pmOff Kilter says:
Well, I said I wasn’t a physicist, but I’m not familiar with conservation of velocity. I’ve heard of conservation of momentum, both linear and angular, but the ball’s mass is a lot less than the arm, so I assumed the ball’s velocity would be greater than the arm’s. Granted, you’re converting angular to linear velocity, and the arm doesn’t transfer all it’s momentum. I just didn’t think it was as simple as “the ball is going at x mph, so the arm had to be moving at x mph.” If this WERE true, wouldn’t that mean the mass of the ball is irrelevant? Is that right?
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October 23, 2009, 11:16 pmSFC B says:
The bat manufacturers changed the game for the better though. Without the metal bats youth leagues around the country would be unable to participate due to the cost of wooden bats. Also, the introduction of metal bats to the high school and college game changed the way the game is played in the Majors. With the metal bats HS and college players learned that they could pull outside pitches with power, something not taught at the amateur level previously.
I’m more surprised that there is a batter in a rec-league who can generate enough bat speed so as to deliver a fatal blow to a pitcher. Even with a metal bat.
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October 23, 2009, 11:17 pmbyomtov says:
We don’t need to speculate quite so much about the pitcher’s ability to get out of the way. Note that batters are often hit by pitches going under 100mph. This happens despite the fact that the batter obviously is expecting the ball to be near him and is concentrating on watching the pitch and reacting to it.
So it seems to me that a pitcher will often be unable to dodge a hard-hit line drive. Even at 96mph the ball is moving faster than most fastballs, and the pitcher is often not well-positioned to react quickly.
Note too that lots of line drives, and even more slowly hit balls, up the middle get past the pitcher even though they are not outside the reach of his glove. This also suggests that it’s hard for the pitcher to react effectively to batted balls.
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October 23, 2009, 11:19 pmJoseph says:
Baseball manufacturers make “RIF” baseballs for youth leagues, where RIF stands for “Reduced Injury Factor.” There are various RIF ratings, which generally refer to the softness of the ball and the speed at which it is able to come off of a bat. So if the ball is not responsible, then why do they make different balls rated by their propensity to cause injury?
(And for that matter, don’t they make different types of ammunition rated for its “stopping power”? For example, hollow point bullets designed to expand when they hit a person so that they cause more damage than a “standard” bullet?)
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October 23, 2009, 11:22 pmCareless says:
Next you’ll be shocked that people who are run over by cars sometimes die.
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October 23, 2009, 11:39 pmProduct Liability Lawsuit Against Louisville Slugger, Because It’s Designed to Allow Hit Balls to Go Very Fast : The Masters Files says:
[...] A very interesting post from Volokh.com: Product Liability Lawsuit Against Louisville Slugger, Because It’s Designed to Allow Hit Balls.... [...]
Ex Baseball Player says:
None of this, not one single thing, is news, or new in the last 40 years. The problem is a single greedy lawyer, and a single misguided, and potentially greedy parent, will destroy a sport which, generally speaking, almost never has has a fatality. Municipalities love to use this sort of legal abuse to get rid of the trouble and expense of these activities, and these sorts of lawsuits are just the way to do. Our kids will all be locked up in the basement watching hulu and playing online baseball games (wii ball) thanks to the legal profession.
Seriously, you didn’t think your snowflake could get beaned in a baseball game? Really? Then keep little precious locked up in the basement in front of a puter.
Let’s see: played catcher, beaned by baseballs tipped by the bat. SUE SUE SUE. (No one tell mama and her lawyer that someone actually tries to catch every one of those pitches while her snowflake fans the air with said aluminum bat six inches above said catcher’s head). Cleated. Batted, hit in head and stunned for a second or two. Hit in the ribs on a number of occasions (rub some dirt on it as they say) Played football. Knocked out. Bone chip in the heel and the knee. graduated fourth in my law school class (I guess I left three spots on the baseball/football field).
Millions (? hundreds of thousands?) play these outdoor activities every year. And mama and her lawyer are going to end that. Not the legislature. Not the other thousands of parents. One parent.
And they wonder why we are all overweight. Do I get to sue mama over that?
And you wonder why they hate lawyers.
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October 24, 2009, 12:12 amAnonymous Law Clerk says:
I don’t know anything about Montana law, but under California law, primary assumption of the risk would apply here. See 185 Cal. App. 3d 176 (1986), where the plaintiff was hit by a foul ball during a professional baseball game at Dodger Stadium.
“As we see it, to permit plaintiff to recover under the circumstances
here would force baseball stadium owners to do one of two things:
place all spectator areas behind a protective screen thereby reducing
the quality of everyone’s view, and since players are often able to
reach into the spectator area to catch foul balls, changing the very
nature of the game itself; or continue the status quo and increase the
price of tickets to cover the cost of compensating injured persons
with the attendant result that persons of meager means might be
‘priced out’ of enjoying the great American pastime.”
Id. at 181.
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October 24, 2009, 12:52 amwhit says:
“Well, I said I wasn’t a physicist, but I’m not familiar with conservation of velocity. I’ve heard of conservation of momentum, both linear and angular, but the ball’s mass is a lot less than the arm, so I assumed the ball’s velocity would be greater than the arm’s. Granted, you’re converting angular to linear velocity, and the arm doesn’t transfer all it’s momentum. I just didn’t think it was as simple as “the ball is going at x mph, so the arm had to be moving at x mph.” If this WERE true, wouldn’t that mean the mass of the ball is irrelevant? Is that right”
?”
no,it’s wrong.
the ball cannot move any faster than the part of the body that is releasing. iow, the speed of that part of the body >= the speed of the ball upon release.
PERIOD. iow, there is NO way the ball can accelerate after it leaves your hand, and it can’t move any faster than the part of the body that released it.
however, the mass of the ball is entirely relevant. if you kept raising the weight of the ball, it would be more difficult to throw it as fast, and eventually impossible to move it that fast. this is why (for example) people snatch less than they clean. they have to move the bar faster in a snatch than a clean, therefore the weight is less (there are severeal other factors, but this is the main factor).
this is also why people can deadlift more than they can clean.
i really don’t want to get into a discussion of speed-strength. but that’s what it comes down to.
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October 24, 2009, 1:01 amRicardo says:
Why should the bat manufacturers pay for this rather than say, the batter or the league? Indeed, the batter’s obviously developed muscles and the strength he decided to put into his swing are more of a proximate cause of the death of the pitcher than the aluminum bat. What reason is there to object to suing the batter that doesn’t also apply to the bat manufacturer, other than the consideration of deep pockets?
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October 24, 2009, 4:10 amDavid Nieporent says:
True, but your argument begs the question. Until the lawyer takes on the case, the potential plaintiff isn’t a “client.” The lawyer has a professional and ethical obligation to zealously represent his clients; he has no such obligation to take a case in the first place, however. If people want to bring unjustifiable suits, he should say no.
Well, yes, we do. This wasn’t a special situation where they switched to an aluminum bat specifically for this plate appearance; that’s what the league uses, as do virtually all amateur leagues. The question is as silly as asking whether we know that the kid — and by “kid,” you mean “adult,” since he was 18 — was aware that round balls or baseball gloves would be used.
The relevant facts here aren’t in dispute, so there’s no need to wait. The real issue here is the legal one of whether manufacturers ought to be insurers of their products.
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October 24, 2009, 4:46 amDavid Nieporent says:
The aluminum bat didn’t cause this death until it hit the hard ball. It’s undisputable that were the ball a wiffle ball or nerf ball, the death wouldn’t have happened. So it’s the combination of the alumnimum bat (*) and the hard ball that’s responsible. So why is the bat manufacturer more to blame than the ball manufacturer?
(*) That is, assuming that the pitcher wouldn’t have died if the bat were wood, something we don’t know. Certainly balls get hit hard with wood bats, too. The fact that the average speed off a wood bat is less than the average speed off an aluminum bat doesn’t mean that a wood bat couldn’t have hit this ball at that speed.)
Yes. The lawyer makes a profit by extracting it from someone via government. The manufacturer makes a profit by selling a product to a willing buyer at a price the buyer wants to pay.
The claim that the product is “inherently dangerous” is both false and a red herring. It’s false because, well, people rarely are injured by such bats. It’s a red herring because so what if it is? Why should the manufacturer of a product become an insurer just because it’s possible to be injured in a freak accident with the product? As Brett Bellmore pointed out above, it didn’t explode or electrocute him; it simply did what it was supposed to, and there was an unfortunate outcome.
Yes, of course, though of course the death itself was not intentional.
Look at it this way: if the ball had been two feet to the left so that it missed the pitcher, would anybody have said, “The bat malfunctioned because the ball was hit that hard”? No. They would have agreed that the bat did what it was supposed to. Therefore, the fact that the ball happened to kill the pitcher is irrelevant to whether it functioned properly.
Adult. Not kid. Please stop spinning.
Sure, because jurors can be irrational and can come to verdicts based on a desire to punish someone for not being sympathetic enough. Is a car “defective” if a pedestrian is run over and killed? No. Cars are supposed to travel fast enough to do that. The fact that a pedestrian was run over is unfortunate, but not a sign that the car is defective in some way.
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October 24, 2009, 5:11 amsookie says:
The problem with that reasoning is juries often think if it made it this far there must be some reason.... and besides it’s only the insurance company that’s going to pay out.
Seriously, one person who came into our business after sitting as a juror, said that. They (he and the other jurors) didn’t necessarily think the plaintiff should get anything for her dumb move which caused her injury. However, it wasn’t going to hurt anyone if the insurance company was out $50k.
What made it more astounding was he was also a business owner and was unable to make any connection to his rising premiums, by those evil insurance companies and this attitude in lawsuits.
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October 24, 2009, 7:22 amepluribus says:
This is a case for the jury. The trial is estimated to last two weeks, during which time lots of evidence the posters here don’t have a clue about will be heard. No, we don’t know all the evidence in the case, David Nieporent’s exclamations to the contrary notwithstanding. I suspect the defendants will prevail, but suspicion is not certainty, and as a lawyer I am willing to withhold judgment. Some lawyers here obviously aren’t willing to do that, because by reading a newspaper article they are sure they already know all they need to know about the case. Let’s hope the jurors base their decision on more than a newspaper article.
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October 24, 2009, 7:57 amBrett Bellmore says:
What evidence? That there was a targeting computer in the bat, causing balls hit by it to zero in on people’s heads? That’s about the only evidence that could actually justify the lawsuit.
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October 24, 2009, 8:43 amSagar says:
Off Kilter:
I am also not a physicist, so have to rely on my highschool physics, but I think you are right.
When a heavy object strikes a lighter object with a certain velocity, the lighter object travels at a higher velocity than that of the heavier object. Pitching is not hitting, but depending on the mass of the pitcher and pitching hand, the finger tips do not have to be moving at 100 mph for the ball to start out at 100mph. The ball is not simply being released; it is being ‘propelled’ by the finger tips, thus imparting momentum to the ball, which translates to velocity.
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October 24, 2009, 10:47 amSagar says:
epluribus:
let’s go with your assertion — please tell us what evidence will have to surface for you to find the bat manufacturer guilty/liable.
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October 24, 2009, 10:50 amRichard Nieporent says:
This is a case for the jury. The trial is estimated to last two weeks, during which time lots of evidence the posters here don’t have a clue about will be heard.
As the risk of being snarky, it appears that the only one who doesn’t have a clue is you epluribus. According to this article the eighteen year injury rate (1989 through 2006) for fatalities was 0.05 per 100,000 participants for national amateur baseball.
http://web.usabaseball.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090813&content_id=6409874&vkey=news_usab&gid=
The deaths are not broken out by player position, so presumably the death rate of a pitcher by a batted ball is even lower. Thus, a pitcher killed by a batted ball is an exceedingly rare event.
Also, why do you place such faith in a decision made by a jury. Are you trying to claim that if you present all of the evidence to a jury they will make the correct decision? Are you trying to tell us that the jury is never swayed by compassion for the injured party but instead dispassionately weighs all of the evidence using their superior intellect? How does the jury get this mystical power to always make the right decision, especially when the lawyers go out of their way to select the most ignorant jurors they can?
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October 24, 2009, 10:59 amLargo says:
Perhaps Owen Meany can prepare a brief for the court.
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October 24, 2009, 11:03 amDavid Nieporent says:
Please don’t put words in my mouth. I didn’t say that we had all the facts; I said we had all the relevant facts.
I am not arguing that the facts are on the defendants’ side so a jury should rule in their favor; I am arguing that as a matter of law, the defendants should prevail.
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October 24, 2009, 11:05 amMelvin H. says:
Maybe the mother and her lawyer should sue the people who built the stadium as well; after all, if someone injured in an accident can sue those who built the road...(/sarcasm).
_______________________________________
OK, let me be serious: One factor that even those who know physics seem to be forgetting–the mound that the pitcher starts from is 10 inches high at the rubber [i.e. 10 inches above ground level], then drops one inch per foot from the edge of the level area at the rubber to the edge of the grass infield. What if the mound were 15 inches higher than the ground (the standard before 1968), or eight inches off the ground instead of 10? Would this pitcher still be alive or injured?
The pitcher does push off the front of the pitching rubber, going downhill, and is lower at the release point than when he started–but still above ground level of the rest of the infield. The pitcher also gains some force/speed from the fact he is pitching downhill and pushing with the back leg off a stationary object (the rubber itself).
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October 24, 2009, 12:06 pmDjDiverDan says:
epluribus, are you being serious? Or are you just playing Devil’s Advocate to the point where it has become absurd. Yes, the bat was designed to propel the ball “so fast” [your addition of “and so hard” is redundant — the force of the ball at impact was solely the result of the ball’s mass and its acceleration; thus a ball hit hard enough to impart greater acceleration results in a faster moving ball] that it would escape the infield, and with a properly hit ball, either go very deep into the outfield or over the outfield wall. That is the whole purpose of the bat. Your phrasing of the question whether it was designed to propel the ball fast enough “that it would kill the pitcher” is simply an emotional and irrational appeal to ignore the fact that projectiles like a baseball are capable of killing people at much slower speeds if they hit a vital spot. I’m an old man, who can’t throw a baseball any faster than about 65 mph — but that’s enough to kill many people who might try to stop it with their temples (or adams apple — or any other highly vulnerable spot). The whole point of a baseball bat is that, when the ball is properly hit by a skilled batter, the bat will the ball fast enough to escape the infield and, in rare cases, the whole ball park. Further, the speed at which a baseball leaves the bat is a function of not only the design of the bat (i.e., its give and bounceback characteristics), but also of BOTH bat speed (how fast the bat is moving at point of impact) AND pitch speed. And WHERE the ball goes — either a high fly to deep center field, a long foul ball, or, as in this case, a hot liner right back at the pitcher’s head — has NOTHING to do with bat design. Holding the bat manufacturer liable for this tragic accident, when its product performed precisely as intended, is just plain assinine. Your arguments to the contrary are less than persuasive.
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October 24, 2009, 12:06 pmMichael Haas says:
In answer to Ricardo: “Why should the bat manufacturers pay for this rather than say, the batter or the league?”
I would say that both the batter and the pitcher have been seduced into playing a game based on a tradition, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Satchel Paige and all that different from the aluminum bat game. The league leaders don’t object because dealing with a potentially painful ball or some injury is part of the manly aspect of the game. Would ‘ex-baseball player’ want to sit down with “little precious?” It would take an accumulation of injuries. They could be sued. Is it however a principle of law or justice that if you find a set of culpable persons, the fact that suing one of them likely might lead to an economic loss means that you can’t sue any of them?
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October 24, 2009, 12:18 pmepluribus says:
I said:
David Nieporent replied:
You seem to be as fond of quibbles as you are of exclamations. First, I didn’t refer to facts. I referred to evidence. When evidence is admitted in a case, it has been ruled relevant. I’m sure you know the difference between facts and evidence. I didn’t put any words in your mouth, although you mistated what I said. When I refered to all of the evidence “in the case,” I refer to relevant evidence. If evidence is ruled irrelevant, it isn’t in the case. I await your next quibble. just to prove my point.
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October 24, 2009, 12:25 pmOren says:
epluribus, I cannot speak for DN, but IMO there is no conceivable set of facts under which the legal theory set forth in the complaint is cognizable. That is the entire point of summary judgment — taking the allegations as true the defendant simply isn’t liable.
It is physically impossible (on planet Earth) for a baseball to travel past the outfield without having sufficient energy to crack the pitcher’s skull.
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October 24, 2009, 12:57 pmDavid Nieporent says:
epluribus: Are you against the concept of summary judgment? (I know a few people who are.) If not, you agree that cases can be decided without “all the evidence.”
In any case, you didn’t answer Sagar’s question: what evidence do you think would be material that we don’t already have? (I know you don’t know what the evidence would actually be; I’m asking for you to explain what sort of evidence would be.) What could you potentially learn about this case that would cause you to find Louisville Slugger liable if you were on the jury?
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October 24, 2009, 1:15 pm912 Truck says:
Sue the Field groomer, for having not groomed the field in such a way to cause a draft to slow the ball, sue the umpire for having not stopped the game for faulty or improper equipment, sue the leage for having not required a pitching helmet, sue the ball designer for having designed the ball with the stitching in such a way as to cause serious bodily injury or death. To what have we stooped as a nation when we will sue, and allow suit of, a manufaturer of a product that performs as designed, but causes a freek and unintended accident.
What happens the next time a boxer gets his brains scrambled by a hard punch? Do we sue the glove manufacturer because he made an 8 oz glove available rather than a 12oz glove? Do we sue the winning fighter’s trainer because he taught the guy how to hit with a harder uppercut than the other fighters?
C’mon people, this has to stop somewhere. Grow up, take responsibility for your own actions, and accept the consequences for playing rough or using utinsels that could have unintended consequences.
ADW
http://www.912truck.blogspot.com
http://www.stopthedestructionofamerica.blogspot.com
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October 24, 2009, 1:16 pmepluribus says:
To answer your question, David, I can only speculate. What if the manufacturers had notice that physical injuries result from the use of aluminum bats in greater numbers than from wooden bats? What if there were scientific studies suggesting that aluminum bats increase the danger of baseball? What if there is something in the design of the particular bat here that increases that danger? What if the manufacturers knew of that increased danger, or know of a way of ameliorating it, but refused to do so? What if they advertised that the bats were safe, knowing that they aren’t? What if the league was also named as a defendant, not just the manufacturers? I haven’t investigated the case, though I assume the plaintiff’s attorney has and would have a lot more insight into the case than I have. I do not say this to argue that the plaintiffs should prevail. As I indicated above, I suspect that the defendants will prevail. My objection is to those who claim the case is so clear on the basis of the newspaper article that we can conclude it is a frivolous suit, that it should have been disposed of on motion for summary judgment, and that the plaintiff’s attorney is engaged in disgusting manipulation of his poor client. After two weeks of evidence (“relevant” evidence) has been presented, let the case go to the jury. Attorneys oftentimes pursue perfectly valid claims that, based only on newspaper reports, seem unjustified. We who post here should be more sophisticated in evaluating newspaper reports. If your experience is like mine, you know that newspaper accounts of court cases are often horribly misleading. (PS–I have nothing against motions for summary judgment. Sometimes they prevail. Sometimes they don’t. Do we know if a motion was made in this case? If so, apparently the judge didn’t think it should be granted.)
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October 24, 2009, 1:42 pmPintler says:
Until the fingertips and ball separate, they must be going the same speed, right? After they separate, what forces act on the ball to accelerate it to a speed faster than when it was released? The only forces I can see acting on the ball are gravity and aerodynamic drag. What supplies the force to accelerate the ball once released?
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October 24, 2009, 2:45 pmDavid Nieporent says:
That’s okay; I was asking you to speculate.
What if they did? Why should that make them liable? Again, baseball manufacturers have notice that physical injuries result from baseballs more than wiffle balls or nerf balls or rubber balls. Should they also be liable?
Again, so? What if there are? Why should that make them liable? What if there were scientific studies showing the same about hard baseballs?
Like what? It shoots lasers out of it? In that case, I’d agree with you. But somehow I don’t think that’s it. It’s a baseball bat. The plaintiffs don’t allege that it did something unusual; they just allege that the ball was hit hard. But that’s what they’re supposed to do.
There’s an easy way to ameliorate that: make bats out of balsa wood. But why should a manufacturer be forced to do that to avoid liability?
Even if that were true, how could that make them liable here? What’s the causal relationship between their advertising and this guy’s death? The pitcher didn’t use the bat based on the advertising; he didn’t use the bat at all.
What if? The issue being argued here is whether the manufacturer should be liable; naming another party wouldn’t make the former issue any less clear.
I didn’t make the last claim; just the others. I really think it should have been disposed of on a 12(b)(6), or the Montana equivalent, rather than a motion for summary judgment, but I’d be willing to live with the latter. It’s clear because, IMO, none of the facts you identify, even if undisputed, should matter.
I do realize that, yes. But unless the coverage is so bad that this isn’t a products liability case against a baseball bat manufacturer because a batted ball killed a player, it won’t change anything. (If, in fact, a representative from Louisville Slugger took a bat and hit Patch on the head with it and he died, then the suit would be reasonable. I doubt the media coverage is so bad as to omit that fact, however.)
What you’re ignoring here is this discussion is not a factual dispute over what happened in 2003, but a policy dispute about whether manufacturers should be insurers.
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October 24, 2009, 2:56 pmepluribus says:
No, David, you didn’t claim that the plaintiff’s attorney was engaging in disgusting manipulation. That allegation was made by pgepps. If you will recall, you disputed my remarks, which were in reply to other posters here, not you. You can answer all of my points and still be wrong, because you don’t know what evidence (“relevant” evidence) the plaintiff’s attorney will present. Nor do I. That’s why I am willing to withhold judgment. Apparently you aren’t.
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October 24, 2009, 3:25 pmRailroad Rifle says:
I hate to be insensitive, but isn’t it ultimately the pitcher’s fault for throwing a hittable pitch?
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October 24, 2009, 4:02 pmAk Mike says:
epluribus — it’s interesting how these lengthy threads seem to come down often to one against the crowd. I salute epluribus for the fortitude to face down the many, and for uniting Oren and byomtov with the Nieporents.
Notwithstanding, I’d like to pile on. In his/her 3:25 comment, epluribus does not seem to grasp the point that many are making — that in the case as it appears from the posting, there is simply is no conceivable evidence that would lead them to conclude that the manufacturer should be liable. Not even if the plaintiff produced secret memos from the manufacturer of a cabal of bat manufacturers paid off by major league pitchers to kill their minor league rivals with deadly bats. Not even if there was a recorded telephone conversation where the bat maker’s executives are discussing how to kill this particular young man. Not even if the bat in question had a picture of Mr. Patch with a line through his head and a skull and crossbones.
Because, basically, the bat was just doing what it was supposed to be doing, and the death resulted from the entirely normal action of the bat. For a ball to leave the bat going quickly is desirable. The intentions, knowledge, and skill of the manufacturer are irrelevant. Activities always have some element of danger and risk. Bad things happen, frequently, without anyone being at fault.
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October 24, 2009, 7:44 pmadam b says:
Pitchers don’t choose the bats they face. If there were industry/league standards as to what constituted a safe bat which this bat’s mfr knowingly violated, why not liability? It’s like a microwave that heats popcorn so hot that it burns your tongue.
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October 24, 2009, 8:17 pmDjDiverDan says:
Just to add, epluribus, as a purely theoretical matter I have no objection to letting close cases go to the jury. However, before taking this to the logical extreme, one must remember that there are costs involved for the Defendant in taking this thing through a jury trial — Louisville Slugger can expect to pay a MINIMUM of $50-60K in additional legal fees for a two-week jury trial — perhaps much more — I don’t know what rate it is paying its attorneys, but if you figure $250–300 per hour, 8 hours in Court per day, plus another 3–4 hours a day in preparation, say 11.5 hours times 10 days, plus say 100 hours pretrial prep, on Motions in limine, proposed jury charge, preparing witnesses, preparing Trial Exhibits, etc. etc. Then we have expert witness fees — who knows how many experts will need to be called to testify about the physical characteristics of aluminum bats, the effect of pitch speed and bat speed on the sppeed of the ball leaving the bat, the reaction time necessary for a pitcher to react to a direct line drive, the speed of a baseball necessary to kill a player if hit on the temple, and the impact on the game if a different design (or a different material) were used for the bat, and whether or not the injury could have been avoided in anything short of a slow-pitch softball game. If everything goes as you presume, and the jury is entirely rational (I’d give fairly low odds on that, but I’m a complete cynic when it comes to jury trials) and finds for the Defendant, then Louisville Slugger or its liability Insurance Carrier will never recover those costs — those costs of defense will be passed along to the consumer, one way or the other, in higher costs for the bats and other athletic equipment. Cases like this would be a whole lot easier to tolerate if we had a “loser pays” rule for all costs of defense, with any plaintiff’s lawyer who took the case on a contingency jointly on the hook with their client. But politically, that’s just not going to happen. So we are all stuck paying the “taxes” imposed upon us by a tort system gone wrong, that allows these kinds of cases to go to a two week jury trial.
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October 24, 2009, 8:25 pmBaseball coach says:
There’s a lot of general ignorance here, of baseball, physics and law. I don’t have any view on the case, but I would like to clear up a few matters.
I have coached successful teams at the 12u (12 and under), 14u and 18u level. My son has played 14u and 16u ball for one of the top programs in the country, as well as high school ball. I only enter my teams in wood bat leagues and tournaments, and my son only plays wood bat. (I’ve also got a degree in physics and practice law, so I’m covering all the bases, so to speak.)
First, non-wood bats outperform wood bats, and by much more than most people assume. Unless a player routinely plays wood-bat baseball (which is true for less than 1% of high school and college players), a player would not know the extent to which this is true.
BESR (the standard for high school and college age play) purports to require that the exit speed from a non-wood bat not be significantly greater than that for a wood bat. However, even a bat that actually performed within that band would be significantly more dangerous (see below). Moreover, the BESR test is limited; a bat can pass the test and perform significantly better than the band contemplated by the standard. Bat manufacturers also invest huge amounts in designing bats that meet BESR but grossly outperform a wood bat. Even a casual glance at an issue of Baseball America (the bible of the business) will show full-page ad after full-page ad of bats that are plainly not going to perform like a wood bat.
Second, a metal bat has a larger sweet spot. This is particularly dangerous to a pitcher. A pitch at the flare from the handle to the barrel of a wood bat will at worst squib back to the mound. The same pitch off a metal bat will drill the pitcher.
(The sweet spot difference between metal and wood by itself explains why it’s so hard to project amateurs to the pros. It’s why — unlike football — even the best college players have to spend a couple of years in the minors to re-learn the game. It’s why so many fail to make the transition to pro ball. Wood-bat baseball is simply a different game. Pitchers have to learn that it’s a rare batter that can hit a quality inside pitch. Batters have to learn to hit those pitches. Moreover, a titanic home run with a metal bat is an easy fly ball with a wood bat. Hitters have to learn to drive the ball — hit line drives — rather than just blast away.)
Second, I would think that libertarians would understand that this is a case of harm not to the person making the choice — the batter — but to another — the pitcher. There’s no risk to the batter. The risk is to the *pitcher*. If the pitcher assumed that the bat was BESR, and it wasn’t, he certainly has not assumed the risk. If the pitcher assumed (based on limited experience and assurance from the rulemaking authorities for his league) that a BESR bat is as safe to the pitcher as a wood bat, he has not assumed the risk. The pitcher may well assume he’s taking the ordinary risks of playing a game that’s been played for a century and a half. But he’s not.
Third, energy varies as the square of velocity. A ball that exits a bat 10% faster (a typical real-world difference between wood and metal) doesn’t just have 10% more energy. Take a typical exit speed for an 16u batter (players who will be in the following spring draft): 100 mph off a metal bat and 90 mph for a wood bat. That’s a an 11% increase in velocity but almost a *quarter* more energy.
A couple of years ago, while pitching batting practice to a 14 year old (granted, one of the top hitters in the country for his age), he lined one off the top of my head with a wood bat. It laid me flat on my backside. Add 25% to that; at best I’d have been in the hospital and at worst I’d be dead.
A minor comment on one of the quibbles above:
When a fastball leaves the pitcher’s hand, it will be going faster than the pitcher’s arm. A fastballer throws with a wrist snap that adds significantly to the velocity.
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October 24, 2009, 9:39 pmErich Boldt says:
The ball will not, and can not, be going faster than the pitcher’s fingertips, which, at least for the purposes of this argument, I think we have to consider to be part of the arm.
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October 25, 2009, 12:14 amDavid Schwartz says:
I can actually think of one conceivable set of facts that could justify this case going to a jury. If the manufacturer made specific safety claims about this bat, those safety claims were in fact false (or at least plausibly alleged to be), and those safety claims have a causal link to this pitcher facing this bat (or at least are plausible alleged to be) and a causal link to the speed the ball was traveling or the batter’s ability to steer it.
I would still find for the manufacturer, but this could reasonably go to a jury. Why would I still find for the manufacturer? Because the bat still just did what it’s supposed to do and there was nothing unusual about what happened in this case that can’t be completely explained by misfortune and chance.
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October 25, 2009, 1:14 amwhit says:
“The ball is not simply being released; it is being ‘propelled’ by the finger tips, thus imparting momentum to the ball, which translates to velocity.”
cmon, this is BASIC physics. as the ball is being released by the fingertips, the ball CANNOT (iow it is physically impossible) be moving FASTER than the fingers that released it. again, this is very elementary physics, or more correctly — mechanics.
think of a catapult. the main difference between a pitcher and a catapult is that it has several joints involved. iow, the body itself is moving towards the plate, then the humerus is moving towards the plate (you add velocities), then the radius/ulna is moving again (it’s attached to the humerus and adds to the velocity) then the wrist snaps (add THAT velocity), etc. the speed of the ball is equal to (or slightly less) than the velocity of the fingers RELATIVE TO THE GROUND obviously, as the ball leaves the fingertips. this isn’t ARGUABLE. the only way the ball could be moving faster than the part of the body that releases it is 1) magick! 2) the ball has a motor inside it.
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October 25, 2009, 2:50 amDavid Schwartz says:
Actually, it can, but it’s not likely in this scenario. Imagine I stand still and roll the ball down my arm, with my arm at a 45 degree angle downward. The ball, at release, is moving and my arm is not. Analogous situations are possible with me moving slower than the ball, though not significantly so.
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October 25, 2009, 6:58 amdearieme says:
“The ball will not, and can not, be going faster than the pitcher’s fingertips”: the truth of that statement depends entirely on the throwing action used (about which I know nothing). But I suspect that I can squeeze out an orange pip from between my fingers so that it flies faster than my fingers were moving.
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October 25, 2009, 7:26 amepluribus says:
There have been some very thoughtful posts in the last few hours. Baseball Coach makes some excellent observations. If he/she or somebody with similar insights into the use of baseball bats were to testify in this case it could make a difference in the outcome. DjDiverDan is concerned about the costs that will be incurred by the defendants or their insurers even if they prevail in the trial. It is the very purpose of insurance (1) to pay valid claims and (2) to pay for a defense when the insured is sued. This is not unusual nor anything to excite sympathy for the poor insurers. They have contracted to pay for the costs of defending suits and they will be required to do so. They have collected plenty of premiums to guard themselves against the eventuality of paying a judgment. If their insureds prevail, a precedent will have been established that deaths or injuries suffered as a result of use of aluminum bats are not compensable in courts of law. The precedent will not be inviolable (other courts can still weigh in on the issue), but prospective plaintiffs will at the very least be strongly discouraged from initiating a similar action, and other courts will be strongly dissuaded from recognizing the claims. I think it’s worth noting that sympathy for the insurance company here seems to exceed sympathy for the pitcher who was killed and for his grieving family, and for other pitchers who might in the future face similar tragedies if use of the aluminum bat continues. I wonder if the sympathy isn’t misplaced.
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October 25, 2009, 9:37 amBaseball coach says:
To Mr Bolt:
If I had said that the ball exits the hand at a velocity greater than that of the fingertips, your comment would be relevant. But I did not say that, and your creative misinterpretation (that the fingertips have to be considered part of the arm) is plainly contrary to what I wrote.
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October 25, 2009, 10:16 amwhit says:
“Actually, it can, but it’s not likely in this scenario. Imagine I stand still and roll the ball down my arm, with my arm at a 45 degree angle downward. The ball, at release, is moving and my arm is not. Analogous situations are possible with me moving slower than the ball, though not significantly so.
”
this is correct. in motions such as this (not a pitching motion), this is a counterexample to my claim that the ball can’t move faster than the part of the body that releases it. it is not, as you note, applicable to pitching, but it iss correct, so judos to you
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October 25, 2009, 3:36 pmwhit says:
oops. “kudos” not “judos” lol
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October 25, 2009, 3:56 pmErich Boldt says:
First, it’s Boldt. Apparently I’m not the one with the interpretation problem. If your fingers aren’t part of your arm then what are they? Let’s try an experiment. Cut off your arm and see how much you can do with your fingers.
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October 25, 2009, 4:05 pmloki13 says:
I am going to add in a few thoughts here:
First, given the facts as reported, I tend to be (somewhat) sympathetic to the bat manufacturer. However, I find some of the discussions here very curious. There seems to be a complete disregard for basic concepts of tort law, either because of ignorance or because of basic dislike and/or disagreement with it (I’m thinking of you, DMN). You can make a product that functions *just like it was supposed to* (doesn’t explode etc.) and still be held liable. All of DMN’s snark doesn’t change the current state of the law.
To exaplain this in easier terms, imagine the following:
Maufacturer makes a standard (non-riding) motorized lawn mower. They do not put any guards over the blade. The following happens:
a) The blades kick up stones and hurtle them at nearby people, including the operator, killing or severely injuring them.
b) Operators of the lawn mower have an unfortunate habit of being killed by the blades.
Now, the lawn mower operate exactly as they were supposed to. They cut grass. They didn’t explode. But there is a RAD (reasonable alteranitve design) that should have been used by the manufacturer (guards for the blades).
So, are there *possible* facts that would support a verdict for the plaintiffs? Sure. Imagine correspondence between the Lousiville executives along these lines:
Memo: Hey Bob– did you know that we can minimally comply with the guidelines, advertise our bats as being in compliance, and still get that added “pop”? I mean, it would cause the balls to go off too fast, and might end up in some added injuries and perhaps a death down the road, but would increase our marketshare by .2%. Rock on!
Again, I’m unsympathetic to this claim to begin with, but the posturing here is incorrect.
1) We don’t know all the (relevant) facts.
2) Tort law sucks for manufacturers. You can say that instead of pretending that it doesn’t allow for claims like this.
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October 25, 2009, 4:22 pmErich Boldt says:
That would be true to a small degree if the ball were slippery enough to be squeezed out from between the fingers but it’s not. The balls are essentially pre-scuffed. In the real world of baseball the squeeze is not used because, among other reasons, it generates less velocity than the wrist snap and it doesn’t lend itself to very good ball control.
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October 25, 2009, 4:30 pmSandy MacHoots says:
The lawnmower example above is off target. The purpose of a lawnmower is not to fling stones at passers-by, it’s to cut grass. The purpose of a bat is to hit a ball. This bat hit this ball exactly the way it was supposed to. If you ride your lawnmower and it cuts the grass exactly the way it’s supposed to, blowing the grass out the side just as it’s supposed to, you can’t sue because it aggravates your grass allergy.
Let’s turn things around. Pace the Coach, wooden bats have their own dangers. They can shatter and send jagged shards of hardwood flying toward dugouts (remember Steve Yeager?). If the wooden bat had shattered and a player had been killed by a flying piece, would the manufacturer be liable for not making the bat out of something that couldn’t shatter — like aluminum?
Or another hypo. Pitcher throws fastball, hits batter, kills him. There are different grades of balls, some harder than others. The league uses a major-league standard ball, which is very hard. Is the manufacturer liable for making a harder ball instead of a softer one? When it has evidence that shows that harder balls will cause more injuries than softer balls?
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October 25, 2009, 9:39 pmDavid Chesler says:
I haven’t been involved with top-notch baseball teams, but my son played in a messy 12U Little League this year. At one point in the season the boys got tired of rally caps, and someone brought out a wooden bat, and that bit of old school boosted morale. (Especially for my son, who tended to choke at the plate.) After he’d swung and hit a few bloopers with the wooden bat, he picked up the aluminum bat, and nearly hit the ball out of the field. Big difference.
I have no trouble believing that aluminum bats are more dangerous than wooden bats (on the order of 1.5 in a million instead of 1 in a million), that baseballs are more dangerous than softballs, and that softballs are more dangerous than NERF balls. I believe that there can be coffee which is unreasonably dangerous by virtue of being much hotter (while still below 212 degrees) than most other coffee. But I can’t see any way that Louisville Slugger should be liable here, or that this isn’t just the kind of lawsuit that gives ammunition to tort reformers.
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October 25, 2009, 11:12 pmloki13 says:
Sandy McHoots,
While you think the lawnmower example is off, the point is that this is how lawnmowers *used to be manufactured* and no one gave it a second thought. It cut the grass perfectly well, and the (very occasional) loss of eye, limb, or life was just an unfortunate.... happenstance. The machine operated like it was supposed to. Hmmm... but was there a reasonable alternative design?
Now, for the bats. The bats operate as they are supposed to. But *should they operate* that way? Perhaps the manufacturers are making bats that do hit the balls back too quickly, and do cause needless deaths?
Again, I am generally unsympathetic to the claim. But to say that it is meritless is to misunderstand the current state of tort law (IMO). I would go so far as to say that it is likely meritless, but I’d need more facts than what the newspaper article gives.
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October 26, 2009, 1:00 amPintler says:
I think the argument is that the league/team/batter/pitcher are free to say ‘those bats are too dangerous — make us some cheap durable bats that don’t hit the ball as fast’. If the manufacturer ships you a bat that’s supposed to only hit the ball at 90MPH, but yours hits it at 100MPH because of a manufacturing defect, then you have a case. Earlier in the thread someone said that baseballs come rated that way — you can select from different grades that will give different speeds for the same hit. If you buy one labeled ‘slow’, and it’s actually a mislabeled ‘fast’, sue away — but if you ask for ‘fast’ and get it, the manufacturer isn’t at fault.
In the last few years, a company called ‘Sawstop’ has been selling tablesaws that, magically, detect that the blade has encountered skin and fire a rod into the blade, stopping it instantly. They show videos where they push a hot dog into the blade and the blade stops with only a superficial scratch on the hot dog. The majority of tablesaws, including mine, are still the old fashioned ones that will take your finger off in an instant. I, being of more or less sound mind, have evaluated the tradeoffs and am still using my old saw. Specifically, I considered how careful I am as far as technique, etc, and have decided the small risk to my fingers is less than the $2000 to buy a new saw. If I make that choice, why should I be able to sue the manufacturer of a conventional saw? Sure the new saws are safer, but I, as a rational consumer, may prefer spending the $2000 on a car with airbags, a colonoscopy, or for that matter single malt whiskey.
The league and players have decided they prefer to play with aluminum bats, because they are cheaper or hit farther or both. It seems like the safety tradeoffs are well known. Why is the manufacturer liable for the decision they make?
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October 26, 2009, 9:10 amuh_clem says:
My first take on this was that it was a ridiculous lawsuit. After reading the thread, I’m not so sure.
1) The job of the bat is not to “hit the ball as hard as possible” as some have claimed, but to hit the ball in accordance with the BESR standard.
2) The manufacturer may have deliberately engineered a bat that met the BESR standard but in practice hits the ball harder than it should.
IOW, there are safety standards in place that say the ball can only be so hard and the bat can only hit the ball so hard. If the manufacturer is gaming the tests to produce a bat that is more dangerous than indicated by the tests, then they might be liable.
IANAL, but merely meeting BESR standards would not be a dispositive defense, any more than meeting other standards would make a manufacturer immune from torts.
I’d need to know more to form a definite opinion, but the suit doesn’t seem entirely frivilous. I do think the plaintiff’s lawyer has an uphill battle...
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October 26, 2009, 11:11 amJMA says:
Sagar:
You don’t remember your high school physics very well.
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October 26, 2009, 11:18 amAnthony says:
Actually, it can apply to pitching, though I couldn’t say if it actually does — the actual requirement is that the part of the ball which is in contact with the fingers at release cannot be moving faster than the fingers. If the ball is spinning, and your point of contact is along the backspin (which I’m pretty sure will always be true), the mean velocity of the ball will exceed the velocity of your fingertips at the time of release (in the case of the ball rolling down your arm, the backspinning side of the ball is actually moving at a speed of zero). However, spin may be due to your fingertips decelerating to apply a spin, and thus velocity may not exceed the peak velocity of your fingertips (I’d want someone who studies the dynamics of sports to answer that one).
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October 26, 2009, 1:16 pmDavid Chesler says:
I think what Sagar says would in fact work if the ball or hand were compressed. (Maybe not the hand, because if the fingertips are part of the arm [which was to prove the ‘arm’ can move 100mph, which was to prove a head moving half as fast as an arm could dodge a ball] then the bit of the fingertip that is decompressing also counts and we have to measure that speed.)
If you bounce a ball off the ground which is moving zero mph in this frame of reference the ball comes back faster than zero because the kinetic energy was transformed into compressing the ball and the ground and then released to kinetic energy going the other way. Same thing with the ball bouncing off the bat: for the tiny instant the ball is in contact with the bat the kinetic energy it brought into the collision is in the compression of the ball and the bat. It can leave with more speed and more kinetic energy than it had coming in.
But I don’t think that’s what’s happening when the ball is thrown.
And I’ve still got a problem trying to wrap my head around a good reason that a bat which allows the ball to go incrementally (11% ? ) faster is too much more dangerous than another bat which allows the ball to go fast but not quite as fast.
Coffee is not supposed to be that hot, but balls are supposed to be batted that fast.
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October 26, 2009, 1:30 pmperlhaqr says:
No, actually, I’d tend to blame the shooter.
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October 26, 2009, 2:40 pmJohn A. Fleming says:
Trade associations safety standards are compromises, made in the recognition that something needed to be done. Making a product that meets the safety standard, but otherwise outperforms the competition, is not “gaming the system”, but good business, and we all do it. The safety standards are tested in the crucibles of courts of law, players and public opinion, and when they are found to be lacking, a new compromise will be made.
Since the ball field dimensions are not going to be changed (they are anthropomorphically suitable), and nobody wants to change the ball either, the specifications/safety features of the aluminum bat will be changed, until once again most everyone is satisfied that the risk level is tolerable.
Let us pray that the sissies of this world and their lawyers do not prevail and make it into nerf baseball, for that would be a civilizational tragedy. A vigorous education in the school of hard knocks is essential for our humanity.
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October 26, 2009, 4:49 pmSandy MacHoots says:
Just to clarify, there is no requirement for bats to meet BESR standards. I have no idea whether American Legion ball (which I understand was involved here) requires BESR certified bats or not. Adult rec leagues usually don’t. People who buy bats are like people who buy golf clubs — they tend to like to buy the devices that allow them to hit the ball farther, which means “harder,” and which have a larger sweet spot. Any league is free to ban any kind of bat or ball it chooses, and any player is free to refuse to play in a league or organize his/her own.
Nobody has mentioned the fact that the whole problem could have been solved if the league required the use of an L-screen in front of the pitcher’s mound to protect the pitcher from come-backers. Given that the L-screen is a widely recognized and relatively inexpensive safety measure, it would seem to be negligence for the league to have failed to require its use during games.
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October 26, 2009, 5:05 pmNickM says:
loki — batters want the ball to go fast coming off the bat. That’s a desirable design feature — and they’re the ones buying and using the bats. Nobody considered the mower kicking out sharp objects to be a desirable design feature.
Nick
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October 26, 2009, 5:44 pmDavid Nieporent says:
Googling seems to suggest that BESR is required by the NCAA, and that American Legion requires its leagues to follow NCAA bat rules. But BESR does not contain any limit on how fast balls can be hit with the bat. BESR is “Ball exit speed ratio,” and the ratio in question is essentially the incoming speed of the ball and the speed of the swing to the exit speed. In other words, if the ball is thrown harder and/or the bat is swung harder, the bat is allowed to hit it harder, with no maximum; the only limit is on how fast the ball can be pitched in the first place and how fast one can swing a bat.
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October 26, 2009, 7:45 pmDan Weber says:
While originally thinking that this case was totally baseless, I think there can be a very rare circumstance in which this case can proceed.
If the baseball bat was advertised as only propelling a ball at speed X and we find that it could propel a ball at speed Y, Y>X, then there is a case.
This depends upon the specifics of the standards and other things I don’t have knowledge of.
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October 27, 2009, 12:23 pmBaseball coach says:
All organized college and high-school age baseball (including Legion ball) requires either wood bats or BESR/-3 bats.
The only use for bats that don’t meet BESR/-3 is in beer leagues — recreational baseball for people who won’t play competitive baseball. A batter that used to a non-BESR bat would not be able to use a wood or BESR bat effectively. Consequently, no one who has any hope of playing high school, college. professional or other competitive baseball would use one.
Why is it hard to understand why a ball going 100 mph has about a quarter more energy than a ball going 90 mph? As I said, energy varies as the square of velocity. 100^2 = 10000 which is roughly a quarter more than 90^2 = 8100.
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October 27, 2009, 12:35 pmDavid Chesler says:
A batter that used to a non-BESR bat would not be able to use a wood or BESR bat effectively.
And here I thought it was just that I sucked at baseball. I must sue the makers of non-BESR bats for ruining what could have been a lucrative career as a ballplayer.
Why is it hard to understand why a ball going 100 mph has about a quarter more energy than a ball going 90 mph?
I don’t think that’s the question. The variation between batters, and between hit balls from the same batter, is no doubt much greater than 11% (in velocity) or 25% (in energy). (And is it energy or momentum that does the damage? That is, is the mortality rate for pitchers hit in the head by balls proportional to the speed or the square of the speed of the balls? Is it non-linear past some level such that aluminum bats at just 11% faster are twice as deadly?)
There are lots of reasons besides safety for a league to specify a maximum performance, like achieving a balance between offense and defense. (Baseball should have baseball scores, not basketball scores and not soccer scores.) Players don’t come to the game to see bat manufacturers think.
The intuitive, and I think the legal, question is “Is it unreasonable to offer a bat that for a given pitcher, batter, pitch and swing will result in a ball with 25% more inertia?”
I do have to admit it’s a judgement call: I think a bat coated with a magic powder that caused balls to come off it at Mach 0.99 would be too dangerous. But having seen aluminum bats in action, it seems obvious that that is not the case for aluminum bats. Most of the time even among line drives hit at the pitcher the pitcher catches or evades the ball, and most of the rest of the time he doesn’t die. (And some of the times — not all that much less — he does even if it’s a “safe” wooden bat.)
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October 27, 2009, 2:23 pmDavid Chesler says:
Update: The plaintiff was awarded $850k.
The MSM reports say it’s because defendant failed to adequately warn that balls come off aluminum bats faster. So the end result I guess will be that aluminum bats will not come with a sticker that says “Warning: Our product will allow you to hit the ball faster and harder.” I guess this is one they won’t bury in the fine print either. (Same like beer alcohol content — I forget if this year they’re prohibited or required to put that on the label.)
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October 29, 2009, 10:00 amAnderson says:
That label would’ve cost the manufacturer virtually nothing. Oops.
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October 29, 2009, 11:24 amDavid Chesler says:
True, but it also wouldn’t have saved the young man’s life nor told anyone anything they didn’t already know. So it will just add to the clutter of labels people aren’t going to read (including the useful labels [if you get this on your clothes it will make bleach spots] and the contradictory labels [don’t use this bike at night]) and add to the impression that it’s all about stupid lawsuits. At least in this case someone can say “It’s not about some stupid hypothetical lawsuit, it’s about a stupid real lawsuit that the label-less manufacturer lost.”
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October 29, 2009, 12:59 pmAnderson says:
True, but it also wouldn’t have saved the young man’s life nor told anyone anything they didn’t already know.
Lacking your ESP abilities, I find myself unable to know whether a label would have discouraged the league from using aluminum bats, or encouraged them to use pitching helmets or L-screens.
This verdict, however, is sure to be widely discussed in leagues around the country. Whatever the final result — and I would suggest to the parents that they settle pending appeal — there may indeed be some children’s lives saved as a consequence. Or maybe not; as I say, I’m a lawyer, not a psychic.
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October 29, 2009, 2:49 pmDan Weber says:
Oh for the love of Pete. If you want to play baseball with wooden bats, go into a league with wooden bats.
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October 29, 2009, 3:51 pmDisgusted says:
Another shining example of how screwed up the US tort system is and how unwilling US citizens are to take personal responsibility for their own lives, actions and risk taking.
It’s outright disgusting.
Don’t want your child to be injured by a baseball? Don’t let him play baseball. Don’t want him to get hurt from a tackle? Don’t let him play football.
Everyone wants a get rich quick free ride on the US tort system and all of the rest of us are left holding the bag for the costs.
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October 29, 2009, 6:49 pmI agree says:
Have the Patches thought about suing the city the game was hosted in for having a game at an altitude above sea level thus reducing air density and drag on a baseball in flight?
How about sueing the Sun? The sun was responsible for reducing air moisture which also reduces air density and drag on a ball in flight.
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October 29, 2009, 7:00 pmthefamilyshouldbeashamed says:
I think I will sue Doc Martin over my open toed sandals. They didn’t include a warning label that dropping heavy objects might lead to toe injury.
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October 29, 2009, 9:46 pmSFC B says:
That is very likely true. However the lives saved will be the invisible sort that is the result of leagues in poorer areas not even forming because they cannot afford to replace their current bats with the soon-to-be-required safety-label/ wooden bats.
So, thanks to this ruling, fewer children will be able to play a sport. The parents are morons as were the jurors.
I hope that the pittance they received was worth ruining the fun that, eventually, thousands of children will not have because they never get the opportunity to play the sport their son enjoyed so much.
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October 30, 2009, 2:16 amMelvin H. says:
It must be pointed out that what was awarded today, $850,000.00, are damages–but PUNITIVE damages are “yet to be decided” according to the article. Don’t be surprised if the family gets “jackpot justice” and gets a punitive damage verdict at least 5–10 times the actual damages ($4.25–8.5 million dollar$).
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October 30, 2009, 2:41 americ says:
Bats dont kill people, people kill people.
This opens the door to suing gun manufacturers as an implement of death being used for their intended function. just wait.
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October 30, 2009, 11:24 amBill D says:
Verdict is in... and is very confusing....
http://www.wlky.com/cnn-news/21467637/detail.html
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October 30, 2009, 2:04 pmHamilton Burger says:
Well, Anderson, if ESP is required to know whether a warning label would have saved the young man’s life, the verdict should have been for the manufacturer because causation was not proven.
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October 30, 2009, 10:43 pmDena says:
seriously? no matter what the ball was hit with it would have killed the boy. when you play any type of sport you know that you are facing the risk of being injured or killed. I feel sorry for the boys parents but you just can’t blame a bat manufacturer for his death. Perhaps we should just put warning labels on everything..
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October 31, 2009, 12:11 amMoZer Bats says:
This is a very unfortunate incident, and I hope that now that this is over, that all parties involved can move on and find peace and closure. The real winner here is custom wood baseball bats, whether true or not, this will undoubtedly help that industry.
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November 3, 2009, 2:37 am