The Deadliest Game

Via Mr. Trend, we read of this morbid collection of stories about people killed in baseball-related injuries. Trend is right to wonder why the article fails to mention Ray Chapman (or a this more recent echo), but I was more surprised to learn that

[i]n the past 150 years, only one fan at a major league baseball game has been killed by a foul ball—a 14-year-old in Los Angeles named Alan Fish. The liner that fractured Fish’s skull came off the bat of Dodger pinch-hitting specialist Manny Mota…

Ron Carlson wrote a great short story in 1994 called “Zanduce at Second,” about a Baltimore Orioles’ third baseman who kills about a dozen people with foul balls during a stretch of several weeks. He can’t get a proper hit to save his life, but he can take out innocent fans almost at will. After reading that, I always wondered why life didn’t more often imitate art (at least at ballparks more crowded than the Metrodome, where the odds of a foul liner hitting an empty seat were a virtual lock.) I’m sure someone more mathematically capable than I could run a moderately simple calculation that shows that one dead fan in a century and a half is about right (based on the number of dangerous foul balls in any one game and the number of points on the human body that, having been struck, could lead to death, plus who the hell knows what other variables you’d need to know). But still. Only one?