Is Fan Safety An Issue? Only If You’re a Sensationalist

↵Angel Stadium of Anaheim: death trap???
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↵Ye gods, it doesn’t seem to be a very good year to go to a baseball game, does it? A guy gets into a fight at Angel Stadium, hits his head on concrete steps and dies. Another guy falls from a concourse at Busch Stadium. Now, two more fans outside the Angels’ stadium are shot by an off-duty policeman whom they were attacking; one’s partially paralyzed. Not only is it just a few months into the baseball season and all of those incidents are on record, but the last two happened within the past week. It’s a rash, a spate, a disturbing trend!
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↵So is it time to worry? Hell, no.
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↵The simple fact of the matter is that attending a baseball game remains one of the safest ways to spend an afternoon or evening. As near as our calculations can tell, baseball attendance has already surpassed 30 million seats sold on the year, and we’re not even to the halfway point of the season. As it stands, the ratio of serious incidents to attendants is firmly in “fluke” terriitory, nowhere near the old “million to one odds” cliche. Granted, the optimal number here is zero, but that’s more a matter of luck than of safety protocol or vigilance by stadium staff.
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↵By the way, we freely acknowledge that numbers deserve a bit of context; for example, if Michigan’s Big House boasted about their fans having a safe experience 99.99% of the time, that would mean 10 to 11 fans were injured or worse every game, and yes, that would be a huge problem, even though an individual fan could reasonably expect to never have their safety imperiled in a lifetiime of attending Michigan games (their confidence and loyalty to the team, sure, but not their physical health). But that’s just, plain and simple, not happening here.
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↵As a matter of fact, people are much more likely to be injured on their way to and from a game than at the game itself. Now, you may be thinking, “wow, being a baseball fan is safer than putting your body in a metal frame moving at 25-70 miles per hour while other cars are sometimes within a foot or two of hittiing you? Good to know!” To that we say, you’re mean, pal.
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↵The point is this: Ballparks already have significant security measures desiigned specifically for fan safety. Some might even say they’re over-restrictive in terms of enjoying the experience; erring on the side of caution is still erring, after all. But this latest uptick in serious fan injury, while serious and saddening, is not significant nor should it result in any dissuasion from engaging in the old American pastime of taking in a ballgame on a summer weekend.↵