Last night as Kevin Costner and Major League Baseball put on their Field of Dreams game, advocates for baseball fan safety chartered a plane to fly over the Dyersville, Iowa ballpark to remind fans that dangerous foul balls continue to maim and alter lives forever. The plane banner read: “FIELD OF SCREAMS! FOULBALLSAFETYNOW.COM.”
“The state of the union throughout professional baseball is still terrible. At least 42 ballparks in the minor leagues don’t have netting past the dugouts,” said Jordan Skopp, founder of FoulBallSafetyNow.com.
Skopp is using this opportunity to alert visitors that the image of the Field of Dreams can unfortunately become the Field of Screams, all too often. MLB continues to put fans’ lives in danger even today.
The plane banner encourages fans and the media to visit the website for more information about the ongoing crisis throughout professional baseball, including the minor leagues where ballparks often place fans closer to the action, with less netting protection, in the line of fire.
Field of Dreams is a dramatic reproduction of a fictional baseball field. “Quite ironically, MLB appears to have installed nearly invisible, high-quality protective netting to protect the 8,000 fans attending this lavish event celebrating a Hollywood fiction about players from 100 years ago,” Skopp said.
Meanwhile, it’s 2021 and people are still getting maimed by 100 MPH foul balls throughout professional baseball, and the team owners and MLB don’t seem at all interested in doing anything about to protect fans.
It’s past time that MLB acknowledges and honors the deaths of Alan Fish in 1970 and Linda Goldbloom in 2018 in MLB, and several more deaths in the minor leagues, and the thousands of incidents involving fans seriously injured by foul balls throughout the MLB and minor leagues over the past century.
Better still, it’s time to abolish the Baseball Rule that protects the league and teams from responsibility.
“Leaders should act immediately to abolish the Baseball Rule. Fans have lost confidence that MLB will ever stop this crisis, and the team owners have not been transparent about their advanced knowledge of the dangers,” Skopp said.
Skopp leased the plane to fly over Dyersville to promote the Foul Ball Safety Now campaign’s demands for accountability. Skopp also commissioned a plane to fly over Dozer Park in Peoria, IL in June, to call attention to fan safety in that minor league ballpark.
“Until MLB finally steps up and fixes this preventable crisis, overseen by an independent safety netting council, we will not stop. Baseball should be ashamed for what it’s done to ruin fans’ lives,” Skopp said.
To learn more, visit https://www.foulballsafetynow.com
About Foul Ball Safety Now
Foul Ball Safety Now! is a campaign started by Jordan Skopp, a Brooklyn realtor, lifelong baseball fan, and author of a forthcoming book about the wildly overlooked scandal in the professional baseball industry – the all-too-frequent incidence of fans being maimed by dangerous foul balls due to the lack of extended protective netting, and related failures to educate fans about their assumed risk at the ballgame. For more information, visit Foul Ball Safety Now https://www.foulballsafetynow.com/
