Research In Action

Spring is here, and we are already well into the baseball season. While Major League Baseball (MLB) games have substantial popularity as recreational destinations, there has been recent media attention to MLB spectator injuries. Unfortunately, records of these fatalities and injuries are limited to individual local or national media reports, and a publicly available centralized registry does not exist.

My colleagues Dr. Bradley Maron and Nicholas Janigian (from the 2014 CHOP Research Institute Summer Scholars Program (CRISSP) and I recently published a commentary (with revised table here) that catalogued injuries to fans at MLB games from 2009-2014 that were available in the public media.

Of the 33 spectators injured, six died as a result of their injuries, and the majority were a result of a foul ball (39%), fall (27%), stray baseball bat (15%), or assault (6%). In addition to the media search, we also contacted all 30 major league baseball teams to distribute a survey to assess clubs’ procedures for tracking injuries, of which 63% did not respond. From those successfully contacted, seven declined to reply to our survey, and four would not disclose any information on incidents that occurred at their ballparks.

Without proper injury surveillance, it is challenging to understand the epidemiology of, and to design proper injury prevention interventions for, injuries at ballparks. Similar to the need for transparency surrounding medical errors to patients, it is in the best interest of the MLB (with $9 billion yearly in gross revenue) and other professional sports organizations to systematically track and disclose these fatal events, non-fatal injuries, and near-misses that occur at sports venues in order to inform the public and to guide effective injury prevention efforts.