Yeager could not play with the risk of getting hit in the area again and the famous “Yeager Device,” was born. Youth and High School leagues require the use of such a throat protector, even on the hockey style face masks.

“More likely to be right than wrong” is not a reassuring standard.

The fact is – though you may not want to admit it – many plaintiff’s lawyers rely on juries deciding cases on sympathy and prejudice rather than the facts and the law.

Are you sure about that?

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20100919&content_id=14847072&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb

And if you don’t think metal bats shatter, you haven’t been on the ball field in some time.

As for your assertion that juries are not dumb, that is not what is being said. What is being said is the bat was legal and was used in a normal way. The pitcher knew the risks and went out there.

The jury may have seen an injured kid and awarded money based on their sympathy. That is a normal feeling and understandable. It is wrong, but understandable. The main issue is “what could the maker of the product done differently?” The answer is “nothing.”

People get hit in metal bat leagues and in wooden bat leagues, Ron. Things happen and despite you wanting to believe you can legislate and litigate all risk out of every activity, you cannot.

2. The idea that juries are dumb but people with nothing better to do then write blog comments (ooops, that’s me too, shoot) are somehow smarter than Joe Average is the kind of paternalism that blog (I think) stands against.

3. “Jury decisions are almost always myopic.” More of the same… Americans are too dumb. Some of them are not even landowners, how do they get on a jury? Why are we letting them vote, too? Where is King George when we need him?

4. To pretend that a purpose of a warning would be for the pitcher to see the warning on the bat completely confuses the purpose of a warning.

5. The splinter risk is, of course, just made up. But, certainly, you understand the difference between a splinter and a brain injury.

Of course this too is a highly unlikely event, but that won’t stop lawyers for liability insurance companies from claiming it may happen and therefore wooden bats should not be used.
End result: no more baseball bats!

Here’s another problem with wooden bats – their weight distribution makes them too heavy. It is hard for little kids to move that kind of weight. They are slow enough with an aluminum bat, which has a hollow end and more of the weight nearer the handle. A wooden bat has more of the weight near the end. That difference in moment of inertia makes a wooden bat nearly impossible to swing for a lot of children.

As someone who has stood behind the plate with thousands of pitches coming at my face, there is a difference. Is that difference big when it comes to exit velocity off the bat? No.

The difference is two fold. First, the bats in 2006 had a bigger sweet spot then wooden bats and also the new metal bats of today. That means in 2006, more balls were “hot on the screws.”

But there has been another massive change that no one talks about and that is the finishing position of the pitcher.

Once pitchers would bend their front knee meaning the body was planted and ready to defend a hit ball. Now, pitchers lock the front knee to get a whip effect from their arm. The result is a faster fast ball, but the pitcher is off balance and cannot do anything to catch or get out of the way.

Up until the 1980’s pitchers that threw in the 90’s were the exception, not the rule. Now it is the other way around. Pitchers throw much more consistently in the 90’s – even at the high school level.

Everyone talks about the bat, but no one is willing to say diddly squat about the finishing position of the pitcher. Even in the pros we see pitchers who cannot defend themselves because they are so off balance when the batter strikes the ball.

It is easy to blame the bat company but I would bet dollars to doughnuts the injured player had the same type of bat in his bag, and was finishing in a position where he was off balance.

Both the use of the bat and the finishing position were approved by the parents and while I sympathize with the kid, the fact is that he and his parents are just as much to blame for the accident as the bat.

Maybe even more so.

As for the child safety seat issue, there is a vast difference between post hoc imposition of liability and a legislative or regulatory requirement that people use a certain product, so the “analogy” was defective at the outset. Others can judge for themselves the significance of a blithe invocation of an unsubstantiated and faulty comparison.