I caught a bit of guff the other day after I suggested that MLB’s impending ban on home plate collisions was a good idea. With so much at stake now for players, even the most macho of players (and especially the ownership that pays their salaries) will want to ensure some reasonable level of protection from injury. Of course, you cannot prevent every injury; sometimes shit just happens. But just because you can’t prevent every car accident (disclaimer: we call them “collisions” now because “accident” implies that no one was at fault and you know there’s always one asshole who was texting while driving) doesn’t mean your car shouldn’t have air bags and crumple zones.
Last night, I learned that pitchers may start to wear head protection as early as next year. Brandon McCarthy, who unfortunately got beaned by a line drive, had to fend off a few haters on Twitter, but seemed to support the new headgear (as yet unseen) after being hesitant on adopting previous headgear. He didn’t actually reveal what the new prototypes looked like, but a potential design can be seen here. It may look goofy, kind of like the concussion-resistant Great Gazoo helmet that David Wright and Ryan Dempster wore occasionally a couple seasons back. But considering the damage that can result from a line drive to the head (Kazuhisa Ishii fractured his skull after taking one off the noggin that became a ground rule double several years ago), it’s not surprising that MLB and the players are considering this seriously. I mean, Doug Fister took a line drive off the top of his hat in the WORLD SERIES! Did he need to be knocked unconscious for people to better accept this change?
I don’t know what the ultimately accepted pitcher helmet will look like, but it will likely allow the pitcher to do his duty with negligible discomfort. That’s the big question anyway: can they design something that will protect the pitcher without affecting his performance and his range of motion? We can find analogies in other sports, like hockey players electing not to wear extra leg protection despite the rare instances where a guy could have his neck cut by a skate. But a pitcher helmet does make sense.
People will grouse about this like everything else in baseball, but eventually they’ll have to come to accept it. At one point in baseball, nobody wore helmets. Catchers didn’t have protective gear. Even hockey goalies didn’t wear masks. But ask anyone nowadays if that’s a good idea and they’ll most likely say “nope.” Changes happen, and progress being progress, changes are mostly for the better.