The line drive that knocked out A's pitcher Brandon McCarthy last month was the kind of ball-meets-skull moment that can make a player seriously reconsider his theological leanings, if not his career choice. But the incident, which required emergency surgery to ease the swelling of an epidural hemorrhage, has done little to alter the tenor of any discussion about safety in baseball. It’s a time-tested tradition within a sport known for the glacial pace at which change is accepted — but it doesn’t have to be this way. Precedent, it seems, works in mysterious ways.
In August 1954, Joe Adcock of the Milwaukee Braves was hit in the head by a pitch from Dodgers right-hander Clem Labine. The first baseman, despite being one of the few big leaguers at the time to use a batting helmet, was carried, immobile, from the field. He had vowed to wear the helmet after watching teammate Andy Pafko sidelined for nine days by a similar pitch to the head, but even then it was three months before he finally put one on. Weeks later, it saved him. Despite spending the night in the hospital, Adcock played the following day.
The change came in the aftermath. As Adcock lay near the plate at Ebbets Field, Dodgers players gathered around him, aghast. So jarring was the scene that Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson visited Adcock in the hospital, where he still held the dented helmet and credited it with saving his life. Before long, they, too, and many of their teammates, were wearing similar gear.
“I guess it was a good thing,” Adcock later told the Associated Press.
Following his own incident 57 years later, McCarthy isn't so sure. The pitcher suffered a fractured skull on Sept. 5 when Erick Aybar of the Los Angeles Angels felled him with a line drive in the fourth inning. Even as he continues recuperating from an injury that could have killed him, the A’s right-hander is reticent to commit to the idea that he’ll ever wear a helmet, even though a Northern California company has one in the works.
“In this game, we obsess over little things to make sure everything is just right, and all of a sudden someone is trying to put a bulky helmet on you that you’ve never worn before,” he told Wired. “Honestly, it sounds like asking a pitcher to throw with the opposite arm.”
His reaction is understandable.
Baseball’s latest batting helmet, made, by Rawlings, of carbon fiber and able to withstand a 100 mph fastball, will be universally mandated next season — and has barely drawn notice. That’s because it merely involves tweaks to equipment already widely used, whereas pitcher-safety advocates are clamoring for a device that until recently did not exist.
Baseball among all sports has proven slow to embrace change, particularly when it comes to safety gear. Adcock’s helmet stood out in the early 1950s, and earned more than a few guffaws. When Ken Harrelson first wore golf gloves in the mid-1960s to protect his blistered hands while batting, he was at first roundly mocked — then widely copied. Even the basic fielder’s glove was slow to gain traction. One of the first men to wear one, Charles C. Waite, was derided as soft for employing it while playing for Boston in 1875. (At least one man, however, took quiet notice. Before long, Albert Spalding not only starting wearing a glove of his own, but began manufacturing them through his eponymous sporting-goods company.)
This general attitude was summed up in a poem by George Ellard, a founding member of the first professional baseball team, the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings:
We used no mattress on our hands
No cage upon our face
We stood right up and caught the ball
With courage and with grace
This is the history that Easton is up against. Last year, the Scotts Valley, California, athletic equipment company offered a preview of its prototype “pitcher’s helmet,” devised in the wake of a McCarthy-esque accident involving a high school pitcher. In that instance, Gunnar Sandberg, a right-hander for Marin Catholic High School, about 90 miles north of Easton headquarters, was hit above the right ear by a 100-plus-mph comebacker. He spent two weeks in a medically induced coma, endured cranial surgery and lives with lasting effects on his cognitive ability. After significant rehabilitation, Sandberg rejoined his baseball team last year.
Last year, Sandberg modeled the protective equipment — essentially a headband padded with strategically placed expanded polystyrene and meant to slip on over a player’s regular cap — with a message for those who may think it looks uncool: “Wouldn’t you rather wear this than be in the hospital for two months?”
That notion is the primary obstacle for Easton, and any other company that may be working on a pitching helmet. The issue has less to do with solving a problem, which to this point has gone untreated, than with convincing players that preemptive safety measures are not only acceptable, but desirable.
“Baseball has a rich history of tradition,” said Chris Zimmerman, president of Easton Sports. “It’s more than understandable that there’s going to be some resistance. It’s challenging for people close to the game to imagine something like [a pitcher’s helmet], to define what they haven’t seen and what they don’t know.”
Tempered reaction to the possibilities for such gear are hardly limited to McCarthy, at least among the pros.
“No. No, no, no,” Rangers pitcher Ryan Dempster said at the mere mention of pitcher’s headgear. “I have compassion for what McCarthy went through, but think about how many pitches have been thrown in the history of Major League Baseball. Millions. Now how many guys have been hit by line drives? The odds are very long. I don’t believe in living in a bubble. I’m all for safety, but this isn’t something I’d ever want to use.”
This helps explain why Easton has focused primarily on youth leagues, which is where innovation of this type typically germinates. Look no further than Little League’s second president, Dr. Creighton Hale, whose patented batting helmet, which covers the head and both ears, became mandatory in 1961. By contrast, Major League Baseball did not universally adopt batting helmets until a decade later, and even then they were earflap-free buckets perched atop the head.
When concerns grew through the 1990s that aluminum and composite bats were becoming powerful enough to put youth-league pitchers in danger, Little League reached an accord with numerous manufacturers — including Demarini, Easton and Louisville Slugger — to mute their performance to better mimic the output of their wooden counterparts. Precedent appears to have been set.
“If appropriately certified protective equipment can be developed to protect pitchers and other players, we are certainly willing to look at approving [it],” Stephen D. Keener, president and CEO for Little League Baseball and Softball, told Wired in an e-mail.
Still, Little League’s own literature (.pdf) states “There are a variety of instances ... where injuries have been suffered which could have prompted a knee-jerk reaction. Succinctly aware of the human element, the organization’s rules committee has been quite careful not to overreact to an emotional situation.”
This seems to aptly describe big leaguers’ feelings about the McCarthy situation, as well. McCarthy himself said he doesn’t “want to be reactionary.” While the incident inspired widespread concern for the pitcher’s well-being among his major league colleagues, few appear willing to take subsequent action.
“We all step on the field assuming certain risks, one of them being line drives to the head,” said Colorado Rockies pitcher Jeff Francis.
“[The idea of a pitcher’s helmet] is intriguing,” said San Francisco Giants reliever Javier Lopez, “but I don’t know if I would be the guy to launch the trend.”
“Maybe if you want to make [a pitcher’s helmet] something that’s an option, great,” said Lopez’s teammate, Jeremy Affeldt. “But a mandatory thing? No way.”
Members of the Pittsburgh Pirates felt much the same way in the early 1950s, after team executive Charlie Muse was tapped by Pittsburgh’s general manager, Branch Rickey, to design what would become the first true batting helmet — a plastic shell with a sponge rubber inner band. Rickey was so enamored of the device — designed to replace the then-ubiquitous thin plastic cap liners that batters used for protection at the plate — and so convinced of its necessity, that in 1953 he had every player on his team wear one at the plate and in the field. (It didn’t hurt that Rickey owned the company that manufactured them.) It’s not unrealistic to claim that there has never been a better-protected pitching staff, a fact that didn’t keep its members, or their teammates, from open revolt.
“We hated [the helmets],” catcher Joe Garagiola said in a New York Times account. “Guys on other teams would make fun of us.”
So did the media. The headwear was widely derided in newspaper accounts as resembling things miners would wear, and United Press referred to them as “space helmets.” Fans took to bouncing marbles off players’ heads. The chorus grew so loud, particularly from his own clubhouse, that Rickey eventually scaled back his mandate to include only players at bat. Regardless, before long, players around the league — Adcock included — were making steady use of the helmets.
Could a pitcher’s helmet eventually earn similar support? Players may be reluctant, but there’s at least one man in the big leagues willing to throw his full-throated support behind such a device.
“Pitcher safety is a wonderful subject matter,” said Rockies manager Jim Tracy. “There are people in this league who hit balls back through the middle that, if one of them clips a pitcher, it’s going to do some serious damage.”
Tracy speaks from experience. In August 2011, one of his pitchers, right-hander Juan Nicasio, was knocked unconscious by a line drive that hit him in the temple. He fell headfirst onto the mound, fracturing his skull and breaking vertebrae in his neck. He missed the rest of the season.
In 2002, when Tracy was managing the Dodgers, Los Angeles pitcher Kaz Ishii was felled by a comebacker that ricocheted off his forehead, resulting in surgery to remove bone chips from his nasal passage. He, too, would be out for the year.
“I’ve seen my fair share of this,” said the manager. “To see it up close and personal is devastating — life gets sucked out of you.... To see a guy laying there, kicking at the dirt, face down in puddle of blood, or Juan Nicasio laying on his side, seeing his fingers twitching as you’re running toward him — that’s really scary stuff.”
McCarthy has tried on a prototype pitcher’s helmet that was so uncomfortable, he said, that “it may as well have been a virtual reality helmet.” While the right-hander remains open to the possibility that the right device may come along someday — one that’s lightweight and unobtrusive and not only comfortable but nearly undetectable — he’s quick to note that it’s not here yet. Until it is, he wants no part of whatever it is a manufacturer might be offering.
Which is to be expected. Ted Williams, after all, steadfastly refused to wear a batting helmet, even as he saw the benefit they provided to teammates and opponents alike. His reasoning: He was against anything that could potentially interfere with his supreme concentration when it came time to hit a baseball. Pitchers are much the same way, but minds can always be changed.
“When we get the product right, we can imagine that early adopter, that key influencer coming from Major League Baseball,” said Easton’s Zimmerman. “That is one of those bonfire moments where an idea can spread. And that’s what we really want to happen.”
