Posted on 12/08/2010 10:40:44 AM PST by toma29
It was just another Little League game.
The pitcher had just thrown two strikes. But when the next pitch was hurled, the batter smashed it and sent a line drive straight into the pitcher.
For 11-year-old Jake Schutter of Mokena, the moment forever changed his life.
Standing on the pitcher’s mound, the ball crashed into the left side of his head.
He dropped to the ground and began to vomit.
He later learned he would be permanently deaf in one ear. And his family is still unsure of the full extent of cognitive damage the incident caused, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday.
Jake’s family blames not the batter, but the bat.
It was an Easton BT265, and most signficantly, it was metal.
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
It looks like all the pundits left out suing the ball manufacturer. It’s the ball that hit the kid, not the bat.
Looters.
I feel for you.
When I was a teenager, I watched from 2nd base as my cousin Mark was hit in the chest with a foul tip (he was playing catcher).
The ball rolled a couple of feet from him, he picked up the ball, threw it to my cousin Eddy (we’re from a small town, lots of cousins), then he collapsed on the spot...they never got another heartbeat from him...
I got one in the gut as a kid. Hurt like a bastard.
20 years later, she loves risk-taking, like water-skiing and ice-hockey with the men her husband hangs around with. She's fallen on the ice after hits and shakes it off. No fear. Life has risk, and you take your lumps if crap happens.
Personally, I’d like to see NCAA and UIL adopt a wooden bat rule like MLB. There would be fewer home runs, but you would hear the crack of the ball on wood rather than the clang of the ball on aluminum.
Ooops! I missed that.
But that opens a new door or two.
Why not sue the company that mined the bauxite?
And the refiner, the designer, the manufacturer and the truck driver who delivered the finished product?
Even if the same standard was adopted, the advances in alloys and composites have made the bats livlier. The only real solutions would be a limitation on the f.p.s. off the bat, similar to golf club regs. Another novel solution would be going back to wood.
I play baseball in an adult wood bat league. All bats have to meet BESR specs. Some these days are made of bamboo and composite wood. Unlike maple bats, they don't shatter when the break, if they break at all. I have had one for 4 years and use it often in batting cages. Not a crack in it, yet.
The only reason the pitcher's parents are suiing Easton is due to the deep pockets of the company.
The bats are indeed responsible for the accelerated speed but that's all. If there is any party to blame then it's on the parents of all little leaguers who want their kids to be home run hitters until their own little kid gets injured like this one.
I play a lot of senior softball and the two main governing bodies are the ASA and USSSA. The ASA has a "Banned Bat List" that is 3 or 4 pages long and each year keeps growing. USSSA's list isn't as long but it still is extensive.
Softball bats today have evolved beyond the metal bats and are now called "composits" since they are made out of carbon fiber. These bats can be made really "hot"....and manufacturers are now being forced to "dumb them down" so they can be used in ASA and USSSA league play
Here's the kicker tho, nobody I know wants to use the "dumbed down" bats but are forced to. The only reason the softball agencies now have such strict rules is to protect themselves and the leagues from potential lawsuits........So the whole industry suffers.
This is an example of something I heard Denis Leary say the other night when he was being interviewed about his new book by O’Reilly. Don’t remember the exact quote, but it was something to the effect that “Americans have been so privileged over the past few generations that we expect nothing bad to happen.”
The reason they are allowed at the amateur level is due to the theory that amateurs cannot produce the bat speeds necessary to cause significant injury. That, plus the durability of aluminum bats.
It is an idiotic judgment which trades equipment durability for player safety and cheapens the traditions of baseball. Yes, injuries are inevitable in the game.
Aluminum bats not only increase the risk of those injuries beyond an acceptable level, they distort the game of baseball. Everybody is swinging for the fences, regardless of their size. The fundamentals of the squeeze play, the base hit bunt when the infield is drawn too far back or learning how to "hit 'em where they ain't" all become lost arts when high tech metal equipment is substituted for the tools for which the game was designed.
Guess I was born too late. A line drive destroyed my left knee 40 years ago. Doc had to wait four days for the swelling to go down before he could operate.
And that damage was done by a wooden Louisville Slugger.
Or...maybe born too early.
Thats why many bats which met the original 2000 Certification standards have now been banned......That really pisses us off because many of us have those bats which typically cost between $200 and $300 and now we can't use them anymore for league play.......
ASA does and it's currently 98mph with talk of lowering it to 95. All bats must also meet a standard called the BPF which stands for "Bat Performance Formula" and the current figure is 1.20. A brief explanation: The ball can not accelerate off the bat more than 20% faster than the contact speed generated by the swung bat.........or something like that.
How is this the bat’s fault?
People are too “sue” crazy these days.
I was at a Dallas Stars game some years ago when the new arena opened. I was up fairly high in one corner but a puck came flying up there anyway (must’ve been one helluva shot). By instinct, I reached out for it but then quickly thought otherwise. It continued sailing on up to the next level and hit a kid square in the forehead. Medics were on him super quick. Long story short, from what I remember about that incident, the family received a refund for the game and tickets to others. No lawsuit came from it. But safety nets went up not long afterward.
You can sue all you want. It doesn’t mean you’ll win. That said, we all know the quality of jury’s these days.
I was on the jury in a civil case that, in spirit, at least, was similar to this one. My argument in this case would be, “wsa the bat defective relative to its intended purpose?” If it was, was that defect the cause of the injury.
In this case the answer is no and no. Case closed.
Oh, and the plaintiff lost in the case I was on. It was pretty amazing. the plaintiff had actually hired a professional who created diagrams of the human anatomy for medical books to draw the particular injured kids head on 3’x3’ poster board. In the end it was irrelevant though. The defendant was not at fault, so the injuries and seriousness of them are really immaterial.
Not all jury’s are stupid - just the ones you hear about. It’s a “man bites dog” thing.
“How the heck did we Sexagenarians manage to grow up without a Nanny State?”
Don’t worry. It is collapsing of its own weight as I type this.
>>It is tragic for the boy that got hit. I’m always a little scared that my kid will hit a pitcher.<<
In little league I was the “home run hitter” on whatever team I played on. For me it was easy. I could almost place where I wanted the ball to go. Then I got to Jr. High, and the pitchers could actually throw the ball. I was done. I was too afraid of being hit.
From then on it was softball for me.
Interestingly, my brother is 55 and STILL pitches in a BASEBALL league.
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