It's hard to imagine a more devastating scene on a baseball field than what the Marlins and Brewers witnessed on Thursday night: Giancarlo Stanton, the game's most exciting young slugger, splayed out and bloodied in the batter's box after taking a fastball to the face from Brewers pitcher Mike Fiers.
The pitch likely put a premature end to an MVP-caliber campaign for Stanton, as manager Mike Redmond told reporters that he did not expect Stanton to return in 2014. It forced Stanton, his teammates and his fans to enter what should have been a promising offseason wondering if and how the 24-year-old superstar will recover from such a traumatic event. And Fiers, for his part, appeared upset and disturbed by the errant pitch both during and after the game.
At ESPN Insider, Buster Olney writes that Stanton's injury could bring about change in how batters protect themselves:
(A)lready we see players in Little League and softball and in cricket wear helmets that also include facial protection. We know this because after Jason Heyward was drilled in the face by the Mets' Jon Niese, he started wearing a helmet with a flap that curls around the front of his jaw - protection he continues to wear to this day.
Face flaps for helmets are like safety belts in cars in the '70s - they are available, they could prevent serious injury, and as Heyward and others have demonstrated, there is really no downside to wearing one, just as there was no strong counter argument to wearing a helmet, beyond personal comfort.
Yes. What he said. Many Major League Baseball players are understandably resistant to change, as they've ascended to big-league heights doing things a certain way and don't want to tweak even the tiniest thing that helped them get there. Game of inches, and all.
But pitchers are throwing harder and harder, and triple-digit fastballs to an unprotected part of the head put players' lives and livelihood at risk. Yes, incidents like the one that felled Stanton are rare. But they happen, obviously, and there doesn't seem to be any adequate reason for the league and the MLB Players Association not to act when there are simple ways to better avoid them.
There's a somewhat disturbing image coming in this post, so I'll give you a moment to click away if you don't like unpleasantness. But if you're even the slightest bit conflicted about whether baseball players require and deserve helmets with more coverage, I urge you to stick around.
Padres pitcher Alex Torres has become the butt of jokes this season for being the first guy to wear MLB's newly approved headgear for pitchers. The same thing happened to David Wright in 2009 when he returned from a concussion wearing a giant batting helmet.
But there's really nothing the league and the union could force on a player that would look worse than the following photo of baseball's biggest, strongest, baddest slugger getting carted off the field in Milwaukee on Thursday. Be friends with For The Win.
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