Defendant is right this is a confusing jury verdict
Posted: February 11, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
No matter what this is a sad case, but it is a sport, not nerf tiddlywinks. Moreover, anytime you have a deceased child you get verdicts that do not make sense.
A jury in Montana handed an $850,000 verdict against Louisville Slugger over the death of an American Legion ball player. The deceased player was struck in the head by a ball coming off an aluminum bat. The deceased was pitching at the time.
The plaintiff argued the bat was dangerous because the bat caused the ball to travel off the bat faster. Duh, that is why you use an aluminum bat. You can hit the ball farther because the ball has greater velocity. The plaintiffs argued the pitcher did not have time to react. That is correct, those people who do have time to react are easy to identify. They are paid a lot of money; their name is on the back of their uniform, and they are on TV all summer. The rest of us learned to duck!
The defendant argued the bat had been approved by the American Legion program and did not need a warning label.
This is where it starts to get confusing. How many times have you seen the pitcher call time and walk up to the batter and say I need to read the warning labels on your bat. Warning labels are for the user and the pitcher is not the user!
I wonder if the pitcher had used an aluminum bat before. Wouldn’t you know why you were using an aluminum bat, to hit the ball farther and faster, to get the ball past the infield? What if the pitcher had never used an aluminum bat, or the team did not have any, how would a pitcher ever read a warning label. If the pitcher had used an aluminum bat, would he have needed a warning label after he hit the ball once?
Then the issue of a deceased child comes into play. The jury found the bat was not defective and was not required to have a warning label. Then they awarded $850,000 to the plaintiffs. This is not a statement on the value of the loss of a child. Jury verdicts should reflect the loss of something more than emotion and a child is not producing income to justify that large of an award.
The defendant in a post verdict press release made a great statement. The object of the game is to hit the ball hard. If you do not want to play that type of game and face those risks, you play softball or wiffel ball, or you stay at home!
See Montana jury finds H&B at fault in baseball bat lawsuit
Keywords: Louisville slugger, little league, aluminum bat, American Legion,
Recreation Law 
The best thing that will come out of this lawsuit is the banning of aluminum bats outright. I know that program costs will go up and wood bats are too heavy for some kids, but maybe our kids need to be a bit stronger anyway. As a rec league slow pitch softball pitcher I can tell you that standing 40 ft. away while a grown man tees up to an underhand pitch with a $400 bat designed to knock the cover off the ball, it's downright scary when that thing comes straight back at you at about 100 mph. And I've iced my fair share of ball sized bruises from all over my body when I couldn't get out of the way in time. What happened to this young ball player is a tragedy, no doubt. But what lesson can we learn? Is it possible that in making a higher and higher performing product that the manufacturer is not considering the saftey of the players in the field. Is player safety less important than a player being able to hit the ball farther with less skill? Obviously as a manufacturer there is a need to continue to improve upon your products and to create a better product than your competition but when do you cross that line where technology advances a game so much that it becomes unsafe. When baseball was created I don't think anybody imagined we'd ever be using metal bats. Where do you draw the line?
Besides, I think America lost something when the “crack” of the bat coming from ball diamonds all around the country was replaced with a “ping”.
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