“Be alert for foul balls and bats.” The sign you see at any MLB ballpark will make it difficult for Tonya Carpenter to hold the Boston Red Sox or Major League Baseball liable for her injuries. Carpenter was the injured Red Sox fan that suffered serious injuries and were considered life-threatening when she was struck by a bat over the weekend at Fenway Park. Her condition has been recently upgraded to fair as she remains hospitalized at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
If you are sitting close enough to the field where you might get hit by a bat or a ball, you have a duty to watch out for bats or balls that may be hit or thrown into the stands. She sat just outside the protective netting, near the dugout on the third base side of home plate. The issue in this case is the ball was hit into play, which could concede that Carpenter was in fact paying attention to the ball, but not the flying bat.
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred says baseball “must react strongly to an incident like this.”
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