Freshly cut grass and protective netting

If you dislike old-guy nostalgia in sports writing, then you skipped press coverage of major league baseball's opening day. The torrent of clichés that poured forth from columnists composing love odes to baseball last week was as predictable as the swallows' annual return to Capistrano, if less graceful and charming. The smell of the freshly cut grass, the bright white chalk lines extending out to infinity, the crack of the bat, the odor of warm nachos... If you follow the game, you know the basic mantra, and, if asked, you could probably dictate some variation of it into your iPhone in the car on your way home tonight.

Many of us lawyers are baseball fans, and it is little wonder. The game offers relief from the obsessive timekeeping and cold clock-watching of our profession. The esoterica of the rulebook appeals to people whose professional lives are devoted to enforcing (and evading) esoteric rules. The sunny green haven of the ballpark provides an outdoor escape from the antiseptic soulless corridors and fluorescent lighting of the law firm. There is something fair about the game, something appreciated even by Gil, Robert DeNiro's character in the film "The Fan." ("That's why baseball's better than life," Gil tells his son while explaining why a sacrifice fly doesn't count against the hitter's batting average. "It's fair.") Gil was a homicidal psychopath and child kidnapper, but he had a point.

As lawyers, perhaps we should all feel a little ashamed at the most-recent change wrought by MLB in its endless quest to improve an already-good game. I write of the brand-new protective netting which now extends at least to the far ends of both dugouts in all major league ballparks. MLB recommended the netting in February of this year, in the wake of several injuries to fans hit by flying bats and balls last season. All 30 of MLB's clubs quickly adopted the recommendation and erected the netting, which is 24 feet high in some places. At San Diego's Petco Park, the barrier extends several sections beyond the end of the dugouts, all the way to the ballgirls' stations.

Commissioner Rob Manfred and club owners tout the netting as an improvement founded in genuine concern for the physical safety of fans. Here's an excerpt of the release recently issued by the San Diego Padres over the name of their chairman, Ron Fowler: "The security and well-being of our fans is our number one priority at Petco Park. We feel the new netting design drastically improves the safety of our patrons, while the state-of-the-art materials will have a minimal effect on the fan experience as it pertains to the view of the field and sightlines of our ballpark."

I read this release for what it was: pious, hypocritical propaganda. I wonder what Commissioner Manfred might have done if Fowler had just told the truth instead: "Our lawyers have figured out what it costs to defend and settle the lawsuits filed by the small number of fans injured by flying bats and balls each year. It's getting more expensive every year. Putting up the netting costs practically nothing compared to paying money out to personal injury lawyers in these cases, and it will help reduce our legal budgets and insurance premiums. Once MLB recommended the clubs do it, anyone who didn't do it would be a sitting duck in the next lawsuit. And so it was a no-brainer. It's also much cheaper than issuing helmets and facemasks to each fan entering the stands, something that would offer better protection than protective netting. As for the fan experience, we have no idea what the visual and intangible effects of cladding the entire infield in partially opaque netting will be. We've never done it before, so how would we know? We're earnestly hoping our fans won't see it as one more reason to avoid coming out to watch our last-place team in person."

And so the fan now finds himself doing what Stephen King recently described about his own experience at Fenway Park: looking through a barrier instead of right at the thing you came to see, "paying good money to sit in a cage."

No one is for accidental injuries suffered by fans at ballparks. But, if the problem so clearly warranted protective netting beyond the home plate area, MLB would have installed it at least by 1970, when a line drive hit into the stands killed a 14-year-old boy, Alan Fish, at Dodger Stadium. That was 48 years ago. Are MLB and its clubs so dumb as to fail to realize until only now that protective netting would have saved his life and spared others from injuries suffered since then?

I doubt it. MLB is making more money than ever, and its franchises are worth more money than ever. One of the very reasons for that is people like you and me. Our sentimental attachment to baseball arose via imprinting during childhood, during what psychologists call "phase-sensitive learning." For adults who underwent the experience as a kid, the spending of disposable income and time at a major league ballpark springs from a kind of muscle memory -- something they keep on doing, not because it is the responsible thing to do, but instead from force of a years-long habit that still feels good. I wonder if that habit would become ingrained in me in the 1970s had nylon mesh separated me from the diamond -- obscuring the view, cordoning player and fan off from one another as though in a zoo, negating any chance a youngster could lean over the rail and ask for an autograph anywhere near the dugout.

It's impossible to know, of course. Now, thanks to lawyers, the question will become academic. Protective netting has gone up. It's never coming back down, and everybody knows it.

Lawyers have done a lot of good things for baseball down the years. But, like everything else lawyers touch, there is some ill to go along with the good they have wrought. Lawyers for Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally gave the players the bonanza of free agency, and Curt Flood's lawyers paved the way for them. But, long before that, it was lawyers who wrote and enforced the notorious reserve clause, which enabled club owners to exploit generations of underpaid players in the first place. The legal profession gave the game a terrific steward in the person of Fay Vincent. And the ranks of lawyers also supplied Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who saw to it that the major leagues continuously banned African-Americans from competing during his long tenure, and the dopey, myopic union-buster, Bowie Kuhn.

I'll be back at the Big A this year. I suppose I'm glad that the chances of a fellow fan being injured by a flying bat or ball have now been reduced from the infinitesimal (.000002 percent) to the even-more-infinitesimal (a smaller number that we'll learn this season). But a part of me feels that lawyers have managed to suck some joy out of a live experience that, today, is a little less special than it was before opening day 2018.