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Originally Posted by mcrowder
At least 4 have been killed that I've read about.
Don't know ... can't ask them. Just know that they did not, in fact, get out of the way.
Submit whatever you like - do you have any printed stories relating the deaths of players whose deaths were caused by wearing a faceguard?
I don't think this is a lawsuit thing (although it could be). I think it's a reaction to the recent deaths caused by getting hit in the face with a ball going 90 mph. And I don't understand why ANYONE would be against this at all. What harm does it cause? Is that harm enough to balance out the risk of death?
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It doesn't take a whole lot of harm to weigh out the risk of death. The risk of death is miniscule. How many players were killed while wearing the current helmet that would not have been killed with the proposed helmet? Only 10 fatalities from playing baseball were reported to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research from 1982 to 2002, although it is unclear how many of those relate to being hit by a pitched ball (let alone to the face) (
http://ajs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/5/1189).
Now, how much damage to the game are we willing to accept in order to mitigate the risk of such an unlikely occurance? How much actual damage to the game does face protection cause? What kind of protection are we talking about.
Without a study of the affect of the new helmet on play, it does not make sense to make a change based on such an unlikely event.