[greymule]

[My screens] have a warning on them saying the screen will not prevent a child from falling out of the window . . . anyone who believes it would, shouldn't be allowed to propagate.

Warning labels are for the 0.01% of the population smart enough to know to read a warning label, but stupid enough not to know that you shouldn't poke a pencil in your eye.

The best warning label I ever saw was in Toys 'R' Us, on the package of a "Superman" costume:

Warning: The wearing of this costume does not enable the wearer to fly.

If we wrapped every LL batter in a mattress, we would save the two or three kids killed every decade by a pitch that hits near the heart. But there would be no way to know how many kids didn't want to wear the mattress and so decided not to play, and then got killed doing something more dangerous. So we have to acknowledge that and try to strike a balance between safety and ruining the game.

I agree with H&B that failure to provide a warning label was a big stretch, because in the case of a bat, it's not as if there's some common misuse that you need to avoid, or some trick to using it safely, or some aspect that might be counterintuitive. But I disagree with what they find contradictory. I think a non-defective product can still be dangerous. (Anti-gun groups tried to sue manufacturers of firearms for the results of their misuse by criminals, and the courts uniformly held that unless the gun was defective, they had no case. Even then, though your Glock might not be defective, you should still read the directions.) If the bat was substantively the same as the millions of others being used around the country, then H&B should not be held responsible. If the bat was juiced to be hotter than the other bats, that's a different story. But the legalities of this specific case aside, the larger question is, Have baseball and softball become inherently and unnecessarily dangerous, and if they have, are the bats part of the problem?

Before metal bats, nobody seriously tried to make a case that youth baseball was inherently unreasonably dangerous. (Of course, the legal atmosphere was different then, too.) So how many annual deaths or facial disfigurements are "acceptable"? Yes, a freak accident can happen with a wooden bat, but there have also been cases in which the guy who crashed his car might have survived if he hadn't been sober and wearing a seatbelt. Would banning all metal bats change the overall picture? Banning certain bats? If there were clear evidence that injuries could be reduced or prevented by changing back to wooden bats, shouldn't we make the change? Unfortunately, a truly scientific study in this area would be extremely difficult to conduct, with so many levels of play, so many types of bats, so much difference in talent within the various pools of ballplayers. The "gold standard," a random assignment study, would not be feasible.

My own feeling is that metal bats overall have made baseball and softball more dangerous, but to varying degrees within the various levels. Little if any difference in under-12 baseball and FP. But a great difference in SP at all levels, with particular danger in coed and company leagues where huge differences in playing ability are common.