I’m not familiar with the facts of this case, but as an attorney, is it your general impression that in cases like this both the verdict and the award size are more often emotional on the jury’s part, rather than rational?

I mean, get the sobbing parents on the stand, show pictures of the fair haired boy, vilify the bat makers as greedy and knowingly reckless(ie, practically a tobacco company) and here’s a winning verdict.

Metal bats suck, but wi wood bats $40 and up ea, HS programs would not be able to purchase bats for a season.

The NCAA and most (if not all) high school associations regulate the type of bats that can be used with the Ball Exit Speed Ratio. Which, in short, is the ratio of the speed of the ball leaving the bat relative to bat speed and pitch speed. More detail here: http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/BESRWhitePaper.pdf. The maximum ratio allowed to be BESR Certified is 0.728.

Now, I know that few, if any, players in American Legion or the NCAA can throw a 95 mph pitch to a hitter swinging the bat around 76.6 mph (MLB average bat speed), but if anyone can that would only give a pitcher 353 milliseconds to react (using the formula in the linked paper).

From a non-lawyer, former high school ballplayer, coach, and umpire’s perspective a warning on the bat will not help prevent these accidents. Not even tougher standards or switching to wood bats would eliminate them entirely. In this case, it’s highly unlikely that the bat was “defective” and the company was building a bat that fell within the standards. I don’t think they should have been held responsible for the kid’s tragic death.

Huck Flener, former pitcher for the Blue Jays, lost an eye when hit by a linedrive to his face.

That happened in the Mexican League, I believe. But it was a wooden bat.

It’s not as tragic as a death, I know. But there are only two possibilities.  Accept that people might get hurt playing sports, or ban sports because people might get hurt playing them. 

What about the fact that the kid (or his parents) voluntarily let him play, knowing what the danger was? Do they get held accountable for putting their kid in a dangerous situation?

Gotta go with APBA guy’s comment.  Really, there are certainly enough dangerous products on the market, and I’d never go along with the so called “torte reform” that the GOP wants, but in this case…someone needed to ask the plantiffs, “Are you and the other parents of America prepared to provide the kind of economic support that would allow non-professional leagues everywhere to use wood bats in place of aluminum?”  If not, then shut up and sit down, all you’re doing is threatening the continued existence of baseball in America…

Please help me here, because I’m having a hard time delineating the legal differences between this horrific accident and suing for hot coffee spillage…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the problem in the case wasn’t that she put hot coffee in her lap and it spilled, it was that McDonald’s had been repeatedly warned that the coffee they were brewing was excessively hot and could cause damage if spilled?

“We should go back to the way baseball is supposed to be played,” she said.
All teams should use wooden bats, the way professional players do, Debbie Patch added.

Something tells me this woman doesn’t watch a lot of MLB games.  She should stick around for this WS and see how many times Rivera breaks a bat, and see what happens to these giant staves as they hurl through the air at 70+mph.  I’m sure we’ve all seen when they stick in the ground like javelins.  As Wade mentioned above, what’s going to happen when a wooden bat kills someone?

Also, for you lawyers out there, if people are able to sue in instances like this, why stop at only when a child dies?  Why not sue for that comebacker that breaks your child’s nose?  Or the wild pitch that breaks an ankle?  Where does this stuff stop?

They can appeal and almost certainly will.  The vast majority of these are appealed and, if liability is not really in doubt (i.e. there’s not a good appealate argument at the defendant’s disposal) they’ll settle for less after the appellate papers are filed.  In many states the judge could step in and unilaterally lower the award.  Upshot: it will be a while before any money changed hands.

At some point, the technology will reach a point where the products are, in fact, too dangerous to use.  Is it at 378 ms?  328 ms?  I don’t know, but it seems like there must be a point somewhere.

The whole idea of suing for compensation for the loss of a loved one is distasteful to contemplate, but if this leads companies to market “Little League” bats that are safer for kids, it’s probably worth it.

And it also seems specious to claim that since people get hurt playing sports, we just have to accept the risk.  At all levels of every sport, risk of injury is minimized to reasonable extents.  Batting helmets, goalie masks, shoulder pads… These are all restrictions on players that we accept in an effort to minimize the risk of injury.  If we can make safer bats, why don’t we?  And if we don’t, why not?

The NCAA started to look at regulating the power of the bats after a ludicrous final College World Series game that ended 21-14. Around that same time, ESPN got Phil Nevin, who was still in college, into a batting cage with some special equipment, the latest in metal bat technology, and a wood bat. With the metal bat, the ball was coming off the barrel consistently at around 115 mph. With the wood the highest speed measured was 94. We all know how little time a hitter has to react to a 94 mph pitch. What chance would a pitcher, or even a third baseman, have with a ball coming at him at 115?

As silly as it might look, isn’t some kind of helmet a possibility?  Or maybe make pitcher’s hats out of that smart fabric that can only deform so fast.