Look Out!

They are a baseball family, and they have a baseball rule: if you go to the game, you stay to the end. Always.

They are from St. Louis, so they are a Cardinals family. Even after they scattered and lived elsewhere, they remained a Cardinals family. Susan Perabo is now 55, a college professor in Pennsylvania whose major physical adornment—since she tends toward understated dress—is the wry smile that sneaks onto her face when she says something funny. Her 23-year-old son, Brady, is a Cardinals fan, though he has never lived in St. Louis. “We gave him no choice,” Perabo says. Her daughter, Chase, is less smitten, though Perabo thought she gave her no choice either. (Cue wry smile.) When they visit Perabo’s parents in St. Louis, days are organized around baseball games. The Cardinals are ingrained for life.

Perabo knows of only one breach of her family’s baseball rule. It happened before she was born, even before her father was born, on a day when her paternal great-grandfather went to a Cardinals game at Sportsman’s Park. He might have been alone. He was definitely without his wife, which might not be so surprising—in vintage baseball photos, you rarely see women in the stands. In the midst of play, fire broke out at his apartment building, a blaze significant enough to have been visible from the stadium. So he left for home. Ever after, when the next three generations of Perabos were at a game and saw people leaving early, they made the requisite comment: “Must be a fire.” Or, “Clearly an emergency.”

When she was growing up, Perabo accompanied her father, who worked in community affairs for Ralston Purina, to Cardinals games about six times a season, taking advantage of comped company tickets when available. Sometimes Perabo’s father brought along a business associate, and sometimes her mother or older sister went, but they didn’t love baseball the way Perabo loved baseball.

She loved watching it, and she loved playing it.

Though she is now a celebrated writer who has published four books of fiction, Perabo wasn’t the kind of kid who spent her childhood inside reading. She was always outdoors, playing baseball with the neighborhood boys. Eventually, she’d play baseball competitively, becoming the first woman to play NCAA baseball while an undergrad at Webster University. One day, her mother called weeping from a pay phone outside the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, because she’d just seen a plaque about Perabo in a “Women in Baseball” exhibit. No one from the Hall of Fame had mentioned the exhibit to the family.

As a girl, Perabo sometimes took her glove to Cardinals games. If a ball neared, she’d jump up for a catch. Others flinched or retreated. Her older sister was ball shy in this way, and Perabo always thought, “Oh, what a wimp.”

One afternoon when Perabo was about 13, her father came home from work and changed into his game clothes: red hat, red shirt, khaki pants. Then she and her father headed for the old Busch Stadium. They had company tickets that day, good seats to the left of third base, in the second section away from the field, but still fairly close in. As they sat, Perabo noticed four men chatting in front of her and her father. They were still in work clothes, though they had taken off their jackets and were loosening their ties.

Early in the game, a left-handed batter came up and, as Perabo puts it, “hit this screaming foul ball” to the opposite field. Sometimes, she adds, foul balls are “kind of loopy, and you have a chance to get under them” for a catch. Not this one. “You couldn’t even see it. It was so fast.” But she could hear it making a hollow sound on impact, as if hitting something hard. At first, she thought that something hard was her chest. Now she guesses she imagined this because fear knocked the wind out of her. Strangely at first, her father also thought the ball had hit her. In fact, it hit the head of the man sitting directly in front of Perabo, and he fell forward onto the concrete.

You could say a lot of kind things about Perabo’s father. He was funny and supportive, a wonderful dad with a profound ability to make others feel valued. But he did not have a talent for handling a crisis, at least not during the initial moments, perhaps because he was somewhat squeamish. When the ball landed, he was sitting to Perabo’s left. He stood to block her view of the injured man and twisted her away from the field. “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,” he cried. But Perabo couldn’t help looking. She peered around her father and saw the man, lying face up. Now the physics of the memory puzzles her. How could he have fallen forward and landed that way, given the tight stadium rows? Perhaps his friends turned him over? His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t moving. No blood, just total stillness. Perabo thought he was dead.

For Perabo, the memory of this event, which happened more than 40 years ago, is at once fuzzy and sharp. “It seemed like everything stopped,” she recalls. “I don’t remember people—at least for a moment—rushing to do things, but they may have been. It just seemed like time was suspended. And that everybody was just frozen. And then probably he moved or opened his eyes. I don’t remember. But it became clear that he wasn’t dead.”

Not that he was well. Medics carried him out, though Perabo doesn’t remember a stretcher. Perhaps he was able to get to his feet and walk? Whatever the case, she knows he left, and his friends gathered their belongings and followed.

As for Perabo and her father, they stayed. Because of the family’s baseball rule. If you go to the game, you stay to the end.

There’s another rule of the game that applies not just to Perabo’s family but to everyone. The Baseball Rule, a doctrine that comes from the realm of U.S. tort law, holds that a ballpark or team is not liable for injuries suffered by a spectator who is struck by a ball if protected seating is on offer in the stands. The rule dates back to the 1910s, and as long as it has been around, such seating has been available, at least behind home plate—where netting protects vulnerable fans. Presumably if you choose to sit elsewhere, you assume the risk of getting hit. If the man who had been bonked on the head in front of Perabo was in a litigious mood, he had only to look at the back of his ticket to see a disclaimer—all baseball tickets have them, even electronic tickets, which have a “terms and conditions” link—recognizing that attendance at a game is voluntary and may result in personal injury, thereby absolving the team of any responsibility.

After the accident, Perabo was phobic about the ballpark, as scared of being hit as she was of reliving the panic and helplessness she’d experienced that day. At the next game, she and her father were in different company seats, but they were still good seats in foul ball territory. Perabo was on edge the whole game.

Her fear was hardly off base. People have been terribly hurt, even killed, by foul balls. In 1970, a teenage boy named Alan Fish died after being hit in the head by a foul ball at Dodger Stadium. Tragedy struck again in Los Angeles in 2018, when Linda Goldbloom, a 79-year-old Dodgers fan, was killed by a foul ball that hit her head. And it isn’t only fans who are at risk. On August 31, 2007, Cardinals outfielder Juan Encarnación was hit by a foul ball that crushed his left eye socket, thereby ending a successful career that had started when he was spotted playing in the Dominican Republic at 16. At the time he was struck, Encarnación was 31 and in the second year of a $15 million contract. Years later, a character in Perabo’s novel The Fall of Lisa Bellow, a high school baseball player, would suffer the same injury.

Encarnación’s disappointment, though, was nothing like what Tino Sanchez suffered. In a minor league game in July 2007, Sanchez hit a foul ball that struck and killed his coach Mike Coolbaugh, who was standing in the first-base coaching box. Sanchez’s teammates repeatedly told him that it was not his fault, but in a September 24, 2007, article in Sports Illustrated, S. L. Price quotes the grieving player as saying, “They’re still telling me that it was an accident, and that’s been very supportive. But whether it was my fault or not, literally I killed a human being.” About six weeks after the Sports Illustrated article ran, first- and third-base coaches in the major and minor leagues were required to wear helmets. Not that the new rule would have helped Coolbaugh, who was hit in the neck. The day before the accident, Coolbaugh and Sanchez had lunch together. Coolbaugh’s wife was pregnant with her third child, Sanchez’s wife with her first, and Coolbaugh was giving Sanchez advice, telling him that his life would never be the same again.

Well, true enough, but not for the reasons Coolbaugh thought.

Part of what frightened Perabo about the accident was how it had snuck up on her. She never saw the ball that struck the man, only sensed it coming. She thought she should have been paying better attention.

She needn’t have been so hard on herself. Even adults don’t fare all that well in similar situations. On an April 2016 episode of HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, Gumbel and his producers asked community volunteers of all ages to sit behind a protective glass placed 75 feet from a machine that fired baseballs. The producers wanted to test whether fans did indeed have enough time to react to a foul ball coming toward them. They had asked Major League Baseball (MLB) to answer this question, but when their inquiries went unanswered, they turned to Washington State University’s Sports Science Laboratory, which specializes, as its website says, in “the dynamics of bat and ball collisions.” On air, lab technicians fired a baseball at 95 miles per hour toward the protective glass. A few people managed to react and raise their hands or duck before the ball hit the glass but not quickly enough to have blocked or dodged the ball altogether. And they were all expecting the ball—they knew they were part of an experiment. Those who were only slightly distracted by chitchat with Gumbel, a quick glance at a cell phone, or a mouthful of hot dog stood no chance. Without that protective glass shield, they would have been nailed.

When Perabo went to games in the months following the accident, she would watch every pitch with such intensity that she couldn’t enjoy herself. As soon as the ball left the pitcher’s hand, she would tense up, trying to focus on the exact moment of contact between ball and bat so that she could get out of the way if needed.

“Look out!” fans and announcers call when a ball is headed for the seats. Or, “Watch out!” And Perabo did. She and her father kept going to games, even though she was no longer enjoying herself. She let her father know that she wished they had seats farther away but was otherwise too embarrassed to confess her fears. When her father bought tickets—that is, when they didn’t have company seats—they were farther away. But when they had the Purina tickets, they got what they got, and Perabo kept quiet. She didn’t want to worry her father or mess with the bond they shared over the game.

A little more than a year after the accident, Perabo and her father received Purina tickets for the very same seats as on the day of the accident. Perabo’s fears had waned some in the preceding months, but when she realized where they would be sitting, she became as anxious as ever. As she and her father settled in, they saw the man who had been injured the previous year sitting in front of them. He was with three others. Perabo wasn’t sure whether his companions were the same men as before, or whether this was the first time the man had been back since the day of his accident, but the others clearly knew the story, because they were gently teasing him, saying, “Hey, we’re going to look out for you.” And, “We’ll protect you.” Perhaps the man who had been injured hadn’t been hurt all that badly? Would they have been poking so much fun at him—and would he be so good-natured about it—if he had been?

Even though they were relaxed, Perabo wasn’t.

Early in the game, a left-handed batter hit a foul ball. Not a sharp line drive like the previous time, but a looping, arcing fly ball—the kind Perabo dreamed of, because you could catch it if you got your mitt under it. Other fans knew this, too. Perabo stood. Her father stood. Her whole section of the stadium rose. Typical in-the-stands behavior for a towering fly. The only person who Perabo didn’t see standing was the man right in front of her: the man who had been bonked on the head. He was sitting, legs apart, a modest manspread, and he was holding a Coke or beer or some other drink in one hand. The ball traced a perfect arc and landed in his lap.

His friends went crazy. Perabo’s father likely made some comment—they felt so in on the moment. The former victim was (in Perabo’s memory) quiet. Not laughing as his friends were. There’s a saying in baseball: The ball will always find you. If you’re nervous, if you aren’t ready to play, if your head’s not in the game, the ball will invariably be hit in your direction. For Perabo, however, this startling coincidence didn’t feel inopportune: “It felt like the baseball gods were giving him a gift” and also giving her a gift in the form of a message, which was, “Don’t be afraid anymore. The odds are so slim that you will be badly hurt by a ball. Most of the balls that come at you are not going to hurt you. And in fact, most of them are going to come like this, and they’re going to be those loopers that you have a chance to catch.” This sounds so much like a metaphor for life (if you’re an optimist), but Perabo didn’t go that far. She just felt she could go to baseball games again, and she did. And does. Without fear. She still occasionally thinks about the possibility of being injured, but not with the emotions she once had.

In one sense, she was right: the odds of being badly hurt at a baseball game are slim. But that doesn’t mean that foul balls aren’t dangerous. Alan Fish, Linda Goldbloom, Juan Encarnación, Mike Coolbaugh, and Tino Sanchez are all reminders of that.

When a 13-year-old girl was killed in 2002 by a hockey puck, the National Hockey League reacted immediately, requiring higher netting behind goals and higher Plexiglas above the sideboards. By contrast, decades would pass following Fish’s death in 1970 before MLB would act. The league added netting only incrementally and initially not all that much of it. Such netting was always required in the area behind home plate, but most serious injuries occur along the foul lines. And each ballpark was left to decide how far to extend the netting beyond home plate.

Enter Andy Zlotnick, a New York Yankees fan whose own experiences with foul balls led him to change the face of American baseball.

Zlotnick’s first foul ball story is the fun one. In 2008 or 2009—he can’t remember the exact year—he was high up in the Yankee Stadium stands, under the awning on a rainy day. A foul ball managed to bounce on the stadium stairs in such a way that he caught it in the crook of his elbow. He then unbent his arm so that the ball could fall into his son’s hands. A sweet moment, though not particularly newsworthy. Not like the next time.

On August 25, 2011, Zlotnick was at another rainy Yankees game with his son, though now sitting fairly close to the field, when a ball slammed into his face, crushing his left eye socket and shattering the left side of his face. If you’re inclined to gore, you can Google the quite disturbing photos of the injury and subsequent surgery.

Zlotnick is a lawyer, though not a particularly litigious one. He’s general counsel and executive vice president at a New York City real estate development company. Still, given the trauma of his experience and the five-hour reconstructive effort to rebuild his eye and place titanium plates in his cheeks to hold his face together, he wanted to speak to Yankees president Randy Levine after his surgery.

He had two requests. First, he wanted the Yankees to ban umbrellas during games—a third of MLB stadiums at the time forbade them because they blocked views of both the game and anything that might be flying toward the seats. Not the Yankees, though. Zlotnick had been behind an umbrella when the ball hit him and had not seen the ball coming. Second, he wanted the Yankees to pay his out-of-pocket medical costs, which amounted to $25,000. Levine seemed amenable to both asks and gave Zlotnick his cell number, even inviting him to spring training. When nothing had happened by the following January, Zlotnick was back in touch. Levine now told him that his “insurance folks” had advised him not to change the umbrella policy or to pay the bills. It was clear to Zlotnick that the Yankees “had lawyered up.” (Levine did not respond to repeated requests for his take on this incident.)

A year later, Zlotnick was still in significant pain, with partial numbness in his mouth, double vision, and retina damage. Reluctantly, he decided to sue the Yankees. As his case moved through the justice system with all deliberate torpor (as my father used to say about many administrative proceedings), Zlotnick was becoming increasingly aware that his accident wasn’t as “freak” as he’d supposed. Among the many horrific injuries he learned about: a woman whose head was impaled by a splintered baseball bat at Boston’s Fenway Park.

Up until 2014, there were no publicly available figures related to foul ball injuries. If MLB officials kept such statistics, they weren’t sharing them. They were saying they were concerned about fan safety, but as MLB executive John McHale told David Glovin of Bloomberg News, “There is no epidemic of foul ball damage yet that would warrant some sort of edict or action by the commissioner’s office.”

Remember, hockey did not need an epidemic to act. Just one unacceptable death.

Even if the word epidemic was inaccurate, foul ball injuries, when they did occur, were becoming increasingly severe. At newer ballparks, stands are often closer to the playing field (to give fans a more intimate experience of the game) and players are stronger, hitting balls harder—exit velocity stats have become increasingly valued by players, coaches, and front offices. Balls could be coming toward a spectator’s face at 100 miles per hour.

What changed in 2014 to make injury statistics available? That’s the year Glovin and Bloomberg News released some numbers, based not on MLB stats but on their own informed estimates. Glovin had talked to ambulance drivers, victims, lawyers, and others with firsthand knowledge of fan injuries, and he knew that public hospitals, which operate first-aid booths at ballparks, had to have records, even if they didn’t want to share any numbers. So Glovin filed a Freedom of Information Act request. He determined how many people had been treated at first-aid booths at three ballparks over select years and factored in data from a 2000 lawsuit filed by a fan against the Boston Red Sox and from a two-year study of injuries at Camden Yards in Baltimore. After consulting mathematicians about the accuracy of his methodology, Glovin published his findings in Bloomberg News: 1,750 people a year, he wrote, suffered injuries serious enough to warrant treatment. That figure got the attention of reporters, who now began referencing it repeatedly.

Glovin’s work did not help Zlotnick in his lawsuit, which was initially dismissed in 2014, then rejected on appeal in 2017, thanks to the Baseball Rule. But although Zlotnick couldn’t do anything about his personal situation, he now had a mission: to raise awareness of the number and severity of fan injuries. He sought advice from Raymond Bonner, a writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker who lived in the same Upper West Side apartment building as he did. Bonner told Zlotnick to contact Joe Nocera at the Times. That sounded good to Zlotnick. How would he do that? “Andy,” Bonner said, “he lives right upstairs from you.”

Meanwhile, Nocera was on a mission of his own, looking to change his fortunes at the Times. As he tells it, “I’d been kicked off the op-ed page by my boss and sent to the sports department, which I wasn’t that happy about. I was going to write a sports business column, they told me. I was trying to figure out a rock ’em sock ’em first column. I’m walking across Broadway at 88th, and Ray Bonner is walking in the other direction.” When Nocera told Bonner about his predicament, Bonner advised him to talk to his neighbor Andy Zlotnick.

Nocera (and pretty much everyone who reports on the issue of foul ball injuries) calls Zlotnick the hero of this story, and he very much is: a dog with a bone who took on what he refers to as the Sports Industrial Complex. Nocera asked Zlotnick whether he was advocating for extended netting. Zlotnick hadn’t actually thought about it till then, but he answered, “Maybe I am.”

In November 2015, Nocera wrote a long story in the Times about Zlotnick, and the article (along with Glovin’s 2014 Bloomsberg article) did result in a change: a recommendation (but not a mandate) from MLB that ballparks extend the netting behind home plate 10 or 12 more feet in both directions.

That was okay but clearly not enough.

Zlotnick kept up his nonstop outreach. He knew how busy journalists were, so he tried to make it easier for them to cover fan injuries by providing the information they needed for their game reports. He compiled an annual Foul Ball Injury Fact Sheet, with links to his sources. He got in touch with other victims so that they would not feel (as he had) alone in their misfortune, and he shared the stories of those affected.

And finally, after much persistence, Zlotnick persuaded producers at HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel to cover the issue. An April 2016 episode told Zlotnick’s story while addressing the question of whether the fan experience would be diminished by more protective netting. To find out, Real Sports traveled to the Tokyo Dome, where almost all fans sit behind netting. Those who don’t want to sit behind netting can purchase “excite” seats, which come with a helmet, a glove, and a warning about the danger. Most important, the episode featured a wide spectrum of those affected by injuries, from broadcasters describing how chilled they were by all they’d seen to players crossing themselves, tearing up, or taking a knee in horror as they waited to find out what happened to someone they had hit.

Why was Major League Baseball so dead set against adding netting? Why resist, given the grievous injuries? Apparently, the thinking was that fans wouldn’t like it, that it would take away from the experience of the game, that those who bought the close-up, expensive tickets would be particularly aggrieved.

Reporting on a game he watched behind netting in 2016, Nocera wrote, “There is no question that it felt a little less intimate. And though the mesh was thin, it wasn’t invisible. It took me a few innings to get used to it. But it was like wearing glasses with a new prescription: It wasn’t long before I stopped paying attention to it.”

There were some high-profile complaints. Author Stephen King was particularly voluble, asking in a Boston Globe op-ed when protection becomes overprotection. Even as he referenced some hideous injuries, including the death of 14-year-old Alan Fish, he wrote that almost 74 million fans attended MLB games in 2015. So why require a change, given that the odds of being hurt were so low? “There’s something almost ludicrous,” King wrote, “about wrapping America’s baseball stadiums in protective gauze when any idiot with a grudge can buy a gun and shoot a bunch of people. I’d much rather see some action taken on that little problem.”

King’s reasoning astounds me. First, this isn’t an either-or situation. And yes, the risk of getting hurt at a baseball game may be relatively low for you as an individual, but doesn’t it matter that 1,750 people, including children, are going to be on the short end of those odds?

In September 2017, again at a Yankees game, New York third baseman Todd Frazier’s foul ball hit a two-year-old girl in the face. “Oh, no,” the TV announcer said. “It’s a little kid. Oh, boy. A real little kid.” The victim was at the game with her grandfather, and she almost died. “This time,” Nocera wrote in a February 1, 2018, op-ed for Bloomberg, “Andy didn’t have to sound the alarm; there were immediate calls for the Yankees—and all the other holdouts—to add netting.”

After that incident, many teams extended netting to the ends of the dugouts, but, that, too, was not enough. So Zlotnick lobbied local legislators. Illinois senator Dick Durbin had seen the episodes of Real Sports and had already been urging MLB officials to do more. In a 2019 op-ed in USA Today, Durbin quoted a constituent—Chicago Cubs outfielder Albert Almora Jr., who could barely speak after his foul ball fractured the skull of a two-year-old girl at a game in Houston—as saying, “I want to put a net around the whole stadium.” After Zlotnick read that op-ed, he reached out to Durbin, then arranged to bring injured fans to meet with the senator in D.C. Durbin subsequently contacted team owners and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to urge them to do more to protect fans.

And more was being done. Additional ballparks were extending their netting beyond the dugouts—half had gone all the way to the foul poles. But half still hadn’t. Finally, facing increasing pressure, MLB made an announcement. On December 7, 2022, extensive protective netting would be required at all major and minor league parks. Unless the configuration of a given ballpark obviated the need, netting had to go to the foul poles. Zlotnick, as Real Sports producer Nick Dolin says, “changed baseball history.”

If you’ve been at an issue for a long time and seen no change, it’s hard not to despair. The baseball issue has some parallels with the gun issue. The Baseball Rule was written more than 100 years ago, when the dangers in ballparks were different than they are now. Shouldn’t the law (and even precedent) take into consideration the passage of time? The Constitution was ratified 237 years ago. Arms then weren’t what arms are now, and yet the right to bear arms remains almost completely inviolate.

Ultimately, Zlotnick believes he lost the battle (his personal court case) but won the war. Now it is relatively safe to go to a baseball game, and Zlotnick does not need to maintain a foul ball injury list to share with media outlets. Not that relative safety means Zlotnick is ready to root, root, root for the home team. “My injury was one of the most painful, negative experiences in my life,” he has written, adding that the love and support he received for his public advocacy and support of other victims “vastly outweighs all that pain and suffering.” A statement that strikes me as perhaps overly gracious.

In the summer of 2023, Zlotnick went with his guitarist son to Citi Field (home of the New York Mets) to see Dead and Company, the band composed of former Grateful Dead members. He otherwise had not been to a ballpark since the day of his injury in 2011. Zlotnick says, “We were sitting in the outfield, and I looked up from our seat, and there’s the netting. I started to tear up. I realized it’s here. It’s really here.”

In 2023, Webster University celebrated Perabo and three other notable alums in the documentary film Untold Stories: Webster Women Speak. The school also asked the Cardinals to invite Perabo to throw out the first pitch for one of the season’s final games. The Cardinals said yes. “Of course,” Perabo wrote me in an email that fall,

I freaked out. The whole family freaked out, especially my dad and my son, Brady. Brady became my catcher and I started practicing. On September 30, I went to St. Louis, did the whole backstage thing at Busch Stadium with my dad and Brady, then threw out the first pitch and watched the game with family and friends—and here’s the part you’ll love—from seats behind the netting on the third base side.

I had not chosen the tickets. The Cardinals sent them to me. As soon as I got them, of course I looked to see where they were, and I was like, holy crap. Then—you’ll love this part, too—I immediately Googled, “Where does the netting end at Busch Stadium?” and happily discovered that it ended beyond our section … so no fear! AND, when we sat down, after the pitch and everything, my dad points a few sections to the right and says, “That’s the section of the old ballpark where we were when the guy got hit.”

Two months later, in December 2023, another postscript email arrived in my inbox, this one from Andy Zlotnick: “Bryant Gumbel is ending his show HBO Real Sports after 29 years and said on CBS Sunday Morning yesterday that getting netting extended in MLB ballparks is one of his biggest victories. And they used a clip of me. Can’t believe it. Took so long to convince any journalist that the story was real and newsworthy, but eventually it caught on, got legs and made some ‘good trouble,’ as John Lewis once said.”

That is: the kind of trouble that can redeem the soul of America or, in this case, the soul of America’s game.