Baseball is a great sport. My son plays baseball, and I'll admit that one of the reasons I don't worry so much about it is because at least he isn't playing football, or some other full contact sport.
Yet according to the blog Transducer Reviews, baseball is the sport with the highest fatality rate for kids from 5-14 years of age. The post is here, and I'll go into more detail about how these statistics can play out in the legal world on the flip.
According to the article:
Baseball has the highest fatality rate among sports for children and adolescents ages 5 to 14, with three to four persons dying from baseball injuries each year. In 1998,baseball injuries sent more than 91,000 children and adolescents ages 5 to 14 to hospital emergency rooms for baseball injuries. Nearly 26,000 children and adolescents ages 5 to 14 were treated for softball-related injuries.
Those are pretty serious statistics which I bet most mothers and fathers with baseball playing young ones are surprised to learn. Yet, when you look at the physics involved, baseball is the only sport our kids routinely play where projectiles traveling at speeds in excess of 60 mph zoom around our little tikes heads.
And this is where the law can, and in my opinion, should come in. It is entirely foreseeable that in a game like baseball, with physics at play like baseball, the skulls, chests, and other vital areas of a child's anatomy will come into contact with a dangerous amount of force and violence. So why then is only the batter (and perhaps the catcher) required to wear helmet in order to shield him or her from these forces?
The article continues:
One of the test series showed that a player without a batting helmet who is hit in the head with a standard hard baseball has a 20 percent risk of serious baseball injury to the head.
In other words, any of those kids you see out there playing first base, pitcher, or center field and they get clocked in the head with a ball has about a 1 in 5 chance of having a serious head injury. One in five. Those aren't good odds. We can do a lot of good by pushing little leagues around the country to require helmet usage. At the very least, by showing we take seriously the protection of our little leaguers minds, maybe when they get older, and some of them become big leaguers, they'll thank us by making better decisions.
