WOW, kid hit with a baseball receives 14.5 million from bat manufacturer

What a world we live in when the bat manufacturer has to pay up because you were hit with a baseball when playing little league. Tragic story but it was an accident, under this theory everybodys at fault for this incident. A kid I used to play with had to get stitches in his cheek because as he slid into third he got hit with the ball and busted open, guess he should have sued the ball manufacturer because the ball was to hard.

http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/...wski-left-brain-injury-settles-metal-bat-suit

 

I'm not even playing devil's advocate here, but I'm guessing I know what this is about as my kid is a pretty serious baseball player. Every non-wood bat has a "BPF", bat performance factor. The typical and highest allowed is 1.15. That basically means it adds 15% in trampoline effect of a batted ball vs wood or stiff walled bat. If you would have hit the ball at 60mph with a wood bat, now you hit it at 69mph with a 1.15 BPF bat. However, a few years back it was discovered that after break in the bats were exceeding that, sometimes by a good bit more than 1.15. I'm positive this is where the suit lies. The question is, would 2 or 3mph have made a difference to this kids heart stopping? Sue for false advertising, but the kid's death? Every parent out there with the cash buys these expensive hybrid and composite bats to give their kid the best advantage possible. If you rounded up all the bats at a typical Little League field on a given day and totaled up the retail price of all of them, you could buy a new motorcycle.

 

Tragic, yes. But is it really everyone else's fault that it happened? Damn, what's this world coming to? I'm gonna sue the silverware company for their forks and spoons ruining my diet.

 

What a bunch of crap! Bullshit lawsuits like this are one of the things fucking up America.

 

This is a good example of what is wrong with the legal system. I can count many ways this would apply to our sport. We all assume risk. Accept responsibility for your own actions!

 

Man, I learned about this in pacer school. I even gave a presentation on it. It's called commotio cordis, and happens when the ball hits the heart on the "T wave". The same timing we use in the lab to put patients into arrest when we test defibrillator thresholds. I don't see why any particular bat would be any worse than another. It's just the timing of when the injury occurs. Could've been a wooden bat or anythin. Poor kid. I also don't see why the kid's brain was O2 starved if CPR was performed. I feel for the kid and his family but this was another bullshit judgement. With competitive sports there are risks.

 

This same thing happens in lacrosse every few years. Unfortunate circumstance, but more back luck than negligent design.

But I guess there's now one more yeller ferrari on teh roadz.

 

Unfortunately "good" CPR is harder to perform than even many professionals understand, I've seen crappy CPR pretty often in the hospital. Getting the airway open so you can move air and ventilate the lungs isn't emphasized enough in classes either so the lay performer is very likely to fail. And IF they adequately ventilated the poor kid they might not have performed chest compressions well enough to perfuse the brain and keep it oxygenated. Couple different pathways to failure, they picked one or both and the kid is fuqd. Sad but not the bats fault I'd guess. As said above it was unlucky timing, not a few extra mph off the super bat. Why not mandate chest protectors for pitchers?

Hope they can reverse this travesty in appeal

 

Wow. Stuff like this is unbelieveable. Why is the bat more to blame than the ball, or more importantly, the kid who hit the ball? Maybe it's because the kid didn't have any money? I think it's absolutely freakin hilarious that they're saying they'll use that money, "To get the care he needs for the rest of his life." Meanwhile, mom and pops will be rolling around in new whips in a gated community while junior is dumped in a nursing home.

 

This has actually resulted in rule/certification changes in baseball bats. As of last year, they are required to be BBCOR certified, or people caught using them are ejected and suspended along with the coaches. I think the manufacturers were even made to change cosmetics; my little brother's senior league all star team went to the World Series in Maine last year, and the kids could all identify the illegal bats from a mile away. Some kids were swinging them in warm ups, and they players would all be taking notes about which bat it was, and looked for them in the games. The new bats are remarkably lower performance.

The issue lies in bat performance increasing the danger to the players. It was an apparently unforeseen consequence of the tech race among bat manufacturers.

 

Does that mean I can sue Ducati?

 

Logic says that if he'd had a better breaking ball none of this ever would have happened. I say sue the pitching coach.

 

Unfortunate, but along your lines, this even was just timing. From the limited information that I know on this event, it appears that CPR was not immediately performed. The ambulance response was acceptable, time wise. In the initial reporting I heard it mentioned that no one knew how to perform CPR (some else from afar had to jump in).

The fault has been placed with the deepest pocket.

 

Chest protectors?????

 

Bet this kids parents wish they'd gotten one.

 

Thats pretty fucked up, but it is funny!

 

Chest protectors in the sense of motorcycle chest protectors probably wouldn't go over well in baseball. However, my daughter always wears an underarmor shirt that has a protective padding over the heart area of the chest. I wish more kids would wear them. She's taken some hard hit ground balls straight to that padding and said she barely felt it. Not the same as a line drive, but obviously enough to take a lot of the impact out of the hit.

 

D30!

 

Yep

http://www.vallebaseball.com/All-Star-D3O-Heart-Shield-p/allstar_phs4000.htm