Category Archives: HBO Real Sports

Major League Baseball Fan Foul Ball Fatalities in Context: Soccer, Tour de France and Racing FAR More Dangerous to Fans than Foul Balls

a foulballz After Andy Zlotnick commented on my Twitter feed and compared baseball to the X-Games and “Reality TV”, as he did in the HBO Real Sports episode I discussed in an earlier two posts (PART I and PART II), I started to wonder if baseball really is as dangerous to spectators and players as people keep claiming. The counterargument is predicated on the idea that 1750 fans are injured every year at Major League Baseball games. That’s the number Bryant Gumbel indicated in Real Sports and it’s the number a lot of others also misrepresent. They assume that is the number of fans hit by balls and bats each season. It’s actually the number of fans injured in relation to a ball or bat. That is, fans often injure themselves going for a ball or ducking out of the way of an errant bat.

All this got me to wondering. As it turns out baseball is one of the safest for spectators and participants. With a rounded up number of 2000 fans injured in relation to a foul ball or bat, and considering one fan in 100+ years has died, I started looking at other fan fatalities in other sports.

THE DEADLIEST SPORTS

Soccer is by far the most deadly professional sport. It has riots. Over 800 people have died over the last 20 years as a result of hatred between fans who’ve gone on to pummel one another to death after a match. Baseball fans tend to riot only when their team wins the World Series, and while a few fans have died as a result of riots, we don’t come close to 800 deaths.

Foul Reporting on MLB Fan Safety and Foul Balls: Real Problems and Inaccuracies in HBO Real Sports Foul Ball Episode, PART I

Aug 18

Posted by FoulBallzEd

It took a while for me to finally see episode 229 of Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports on HBO. I finally had to buy HBONow in order to see what all the hype was. What I discovered is a report filled with misunderstandings, misinformation and incorrect assumptions. It was and is one of the most misleading pieces I’ve seen about foul balls.

This rebuttal and correction of the blatant errors in the Real Sports episode will end up in two parts because of the sheep enormity of the misinformation and misrepresentation.

Gumbel starts his report by quoting an article FoulBallz.com was a part of. I had the honor of discussing foul ball injuries with David Glovin, the author of “Baseball Caught Looking as Fouls Injure 1,750 Fans a Year.” Something Gumbel misrepresents and fails to clarify at about 3:20 into the report is that those injuries are mostly, about 98%, due to the spectators themselves. Fans jump over each other, over seats, dive, get in scrums with others. All of these count toward Glovin’s figure. Gumbel’s report failed to mention that little fact. Instead, he reported fans are hurt by them….