A day of watching baseball with your family sounds like an ideal day out for most people. However, this family’s fun day out turned into a nightmare after their little girl was hit by an errant baseball!
A family was out enjoying a day of baseball together and not even in their wildest could have imagined what befell them on the day. The Yankees were playing against the Minnesota Twins in a three-game series.
Yankee player Todd Frazier was up to bat and the crowd was excited to see him perform. Frazier hit the bat against his shoes and got into position. As the ball came barrelling toward him, he made a shot.
The shot flew in the air and landed right in the face of a little girl at 105 miles per hour. The little girl, who was a toddler was not expecting the incident at all.
When the crowd and players realized what had happened, everyone fell silent and looked sick with worry. Concerned people in the crowd gathered around the little girl and her family to offer help and any assistance that might be needed from them.
While on the field, the players all looked devastated at the concerning turn of events. While some players went on their knees to pray, others were blatantly tearing up and upset. The game was on pause for four minutes, while the little girl was taken out of the stadium to the nearby Columbia hospital for emergency medical attention.
At the hospital, the little girl was placed in a neck brace and had a fractured skull and bleeding in her brain. Both her eyes had swollen shut and the stitch on the baseball had cut into her forehead. She was in the ICU for six days, hooked up to several machines to monitor her health. Her parents recall that week as “the longest days of our lives.”
The 2-year-old girl’s father Geoffrey Jacobson later commented that his daughter walking away from the injury without losing her life was “nothing short of a miracle.”
In 2020, almost three years after the incident, he revealed, “an inch up or down, left or right and things could be completely different. At this point, she gets to live like a normal 4-year-old. There are no more eye patches, no more restrictions. Just periodic doctor appointment checkups.”
She might have to have surgery on her orbital socket or nose when she gets older and for now, still goes to the eye doctor and neurologist every six months, but other than that, she is a normal 4-year-old energetic child.
Jacobson did not file a lawsuit after the incident and says, “it will be a long while before I take my children to a baseball game. Eventually the time will be right and we will make sure we are behind protective netting.”
To avoid incidents exactly like this one, since 2015 major league baseball teams have been encouraged to place extended netting all around their dugouts so fans and spectators of the sport are not hit by errant baseballs.
Now fans are riled up again, and asking major league baseball teams and their management to add netting to fields they use for games because, without netting, tragedies and incidents like these are impossible to avoid.
We are so happy that the little girl is doing well now. What a horrifying incident to have to go through at such a tender age.
Share this piece to warn people about the dangers of being at a baseball game where the stadium does not have protective netting.
