Letter to MLB from Jordan Skopp November 2020
Dear Commissioner Manfred and MLB team owners,
My name is Jordan Skopp and I am a Brooklyn-based realtor and lifelong baseball fan.
I am appealing to you today to please take immediate action to extend safety netting throughout all MLB, Minor League and Spring Training facilities so that all baseball fans will be protected from dangerous foul balls from now on.
As you are well aware, at least 15 fans were maimed by foul balls in MLB during the 2019 regular season, including several young children who were severely injured. Although publicly available data are not available, this situation surely is even more precarious for fans at the minor league level, where ballparks are sorely lacking in adequate protective netting.
This is unacceptable, and I contend that your knowledge of this ongoing pattern of maimings each year puts your industry in the same category as Big Tobacco. In order to rescue the reputation of professional baseball from this ongoing scandal, it is imperative that you now act transparently to fix this entirely preventable epidemic of serious foul ball injuries to fans.
Commissioner Manfred, you must mandate comprehensive extended netting at all MLB, Minor League and Spring Training facilities. The record of ongoing maimings clearly proves that leaving it up to individual teams has not worked, and fans have suffered greatly as a result of inconsistent and ineffective leadership on this issue. It’s been far too long that you’ve been dancing around the issue of fan safety. The buck stops with you, sir.
It’s long overdue for all fans to be protected from dangerous line drive foul balls. The past is the past. Please fix this problem now before fans return to the ballpark. Collaborate with local authorities throughout North America to ensure that no maiming will ever occur again in your stadiums and ballparks.
I have started a petition at FoulBallSafetyNow.com where fans can join this effort to hold you all to account.
My forthcoming book on this topic will review the history of failure to respect fans’ lives, including the two known fan fatalities at the Major League level — 14-year-old Alan Fish in 1970, and 79-year-old Linda Goldbloom in 2018. More protective netting should have gone up immediately after Fish’s death. MLB could have acted responsibly to protect fans from that day forward. It didn’t happen.
Before fans return to watch America’s pastime in person, you bear the responsibility to ensure that your facilities are updated to completely end the era of foul ball fan maimings once and for all.
Get it done.
Sincerely,
Jordan Skopp