Baseball Finally Does the Right Thing

On Wednesday, during Major League Baseball’s quarterly owners meetings, the Tampa Bay Rays and the Arizona Diamondbacks announced that they would be adding protective netting in front of the seats along first and third base at their stadiums. In doing so, they became the 29 and 30 teams to conclude that additional netting was needed to protect fans from screaming foul balls and flying broken bats.

Which means that when the season opens on March 29, all 30 teams will have extended netting in place. In some stadiums, such as Target Field in Minneapolis, the nets will run all the way to the foul poles; in others, they will only extend from the traditional netting behind home plate to the beginning of the dugouts. Although a vocal minority of fans have objected to the netting -- saying that it will obstruct the view and create an unnecessary barrier between fans and players -- baseball has finally decided that preventing fan injuries has to come first.