Royals manager Ned Yost has been around baseball his whole life, so there isn’t much he hasn’t seen at the ballpark.
Still, one thing that always amazes (and concerns) him is the fervent way fans pursue baseballs, a pastime that turned tragic Thursday when a man plunged to his death while reaching for a ball that Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton threw into the stands.“It’s like throwing a piece of bread into a duck pond,” Yost said before the Royals’ game Friday. “You see adults running over kids, kids running over adults. … It’s a scramble every time the ball goes into the stands, and it’s everywhere. I don’t know what you do about it.”It didn’t used to be this way, Yost said. Sure, fans have always craved game-used baseballs. But unlike today, when players routinely throw them to fans before and during games, Yost said there was a time when players were more cautious. “Everybody used to be real conservative before the (1994) strike,” Yost said. “But after the strike, that was kind of a way to appease some of the anger in our fans.”For his part, Yost understands why.“They do love (it),” said Yost, who admitted he “steamrolled” his buddies for baseballs in his younger days. “But there are some dangers to it.”As the Rangers found out this week. And few were more distraught than Hamilton, who rarely throws baseballs into the stands but decided to do it Thursday when an Oakland foul ball ricocheted into left field and Hamilton picked it up.Shannon Stone, a 39-year-old firefighter, yelled at him with his son, 6-year-old Cooper. “Behind me I heard someone say ‘Hey, Hamilton’ how about the next one,” Hamilton told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Friday. “I turned around and Stone was the first guy I saw sitting there with his son. I gave him a nod, and I got the next one and threw it in that direction.”What ensued, Hamilton said, happened in slow motion. Shannon Stone, at 6 feet 3, stretched and reached out to grab Hamilton’s toss. But he tumbled over a 33-inch-tall railing, fell through a gap of several feet between the left-field seats and the 14-foot-high outfield wall and plunged 20 feet onto concrete below — right in front of his son. He died a short time later at a hospital “It was just hard for me, hearing the little boy screaming for his daddy after he had fallen,” Hamilton said. “And then being home with my kids, (it) really hit home last night.” On Friday in Arlington, players had the option of getting grief counseling. Both the Rangers and the A’s wore black ribbons on their uniforms, flags flew at half-staff and a black tarpaulin covered the gap where Stone fell. Hamilton played Friday night, and in the sixth inning, he hit a foul ball that struck a male fan sitting behind the third-base dugout. Rangers officials said the fan, who needed stitches, was treated at the stadium.This kind of tragedy often forces organizations to question whether they are doing all they can to prevent a similar incident in their towns, and the Royals are no different. Toby Cook, the team’s vice president of community affairs, asked around and said no one within the organization could recall a similar incident occurring at Kauffman Stadium dating back at least 10 years.“There hasn’t been a report of somebody falling from one deck to the next or anything like that,” Cook said. “We’ve had instances where people have jumped on the field, which buys them an automatic night in jail. And there was one guy who jumped on the field and broke his ankle. But nothing to the extent of what happened in Texas.”Thursday’s tragedy was the second fatal fall at a major-league stadium this season. In May, a fan died after falling about 20 feet and striking his head on concrete during a Colorado Rockies game. Witnesses told police he had been trying to slide down a staircase railing and lost his balance.Cook said the Royals take precautions to keep fans from putting themselves in danger. Ushers are placed in every section of the park, and they routinely watch for fans leaning on or over the railings in the upper decks. When they spot one, Cook said they are told to be mindful of the railing.“It’s a marriage of common sense and ushers keeping an eye on people,” Cook said.The truth is, though, there’s really only so much the club can do about it, short of raising the railings in the danger spots, such as the upper decks or the outfield walls. And Cook said it would probably take a leaguewide initiative to prompt such a thing. So in the meantime, it will be up to people to exercise common sense. That includes ballplayers, too.“In hindsight, yeah,” Royals outfielder Mitch Maier said, “if you could have avoided that by throwing it 5 feet further, absolutely, you’d do that in a heartbeat.” But when asked what he will do the next time a fan asks for a ball in the outfield, Maier had to think about it for a second.“I’ll probably throw it to him,” Maier said. “But I’ll definitely put a little something on it, throw it over his head … let the fans scramble for it in the stands.”Read more Royals
Posted on Fri, Jul. 08, 2011 11:18 PM
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Pursuing baseballs at the ballpark can be hazardous
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Star news services contributed to this report.
