Netting at Nationals Park protects fans from a splintered bat

If anyone is still objecting to safety netting at baseball stadiums, what happened during Wednesday’s game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Washington Nationals should quiet them quickly.

The game was being played at Nationals Park, and in the top of the seventh inning Cesar Hernandez came to bat against Gio Gonzalez. On the second pitch of the at-bat, Hernandez hit a foul that made his bat splinter at the neck, creating two very sharp shards. One was the small end of the bat, which was still in Hernandez’s hands. The second shard was the other two-thirds of the bat, which was heavy and had a sharp and incredibly dangerous point at the end of it.

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The small shard stayed in Hernandez’s hands, but the larger shard flew behind him with alarming speed. Thankfully, this isn’t a story about how someone was injured by a sharp, flying bat shard. And that’s because the safety netting at Nationals Park caught the bat and stopped it from careening into the stands.

Without the netting, that broken bat could have literally impaled someone. But with it, the splinter got caught in the webbing and hung there harmlessly. A year ago, there was no netting in that area of the park, and that bat would have definitely flown into the stands. But in March the Nationals announced that they were extending their safety netting to cover both dugouts. That’s the netting that caught Cesar Hernandez’s broken bat.

The new safety netting at Nationals Park prevented fans from getting injured on Wednesday night. That’s why it’s there, and it’s hard to make a serious argument against that.

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