MLB = Nanny State, Revisited

First base coaches, now batting practice. In the wake of the freak accident that Chipper Jones suffered during a pregame warm-up last month (video footage worthy of the Zapruder family reproduced above), at least one team has decided that it will not be complacent any longer: the Los Angeles Dodgers now all wear batting helmets during BP. I know this because I watched them take BP this evening, and they were all wearing batting helmets.

[In a related story, the Giants have a pregame contest where they invite three fans onto the field to try to catch fly balls shot out of a pitching machine--and the fans also all wear batting helmets. To catch fly balls.]

The good news: Mothers' League Baseball has not yet stepped in to require that first basemen wear catchers' masks during between-inning infield ground-ball tossing, even despite the black eye Kevin Youkilis recently sustained in the course of that treacherous activity. The bad news: the scourge of over-reaction to a high-profile but extremely improbable incident has struck again. Because the people who run baseball are idiots.

Sometime in the relatively near future, there's going to be another weird accident involving someone unpredictably getting injured on a baseball field in some bizarre way. Like, a line drive is going to hit a pitcher warming up in one of those bullpens that are right on the field in foul territory. Or a groundskeeper is going to have his eyeballs burst when a soprano national anthem singer gets to "la-and of the freeee" and the frequency of the high note pierces the film of his irises. Can we just agree now that in the aftermath of that episode, whatever it is, we're going to acknowledge that it will never, in a hundred years, happen again, that it was a risk worth bearing, and that we're not going to make relief pitchers warm up in riot gear and the grounds crew wear safety goggles?