Safe on First?

Once upon a time, baseball was a game of wooden bats and grass-stained jeans and carefree summer afternoons. Today, the bats are high-tech metal weapons, and the players seem to be girding for battle, not play.

Just how dangerous is youth baseball?

The truth is, nobody knows. According to Fred Mueller, director of Carolina's National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, there is very little reliable information about baseball injuries in recreational leagues. In 1996, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported that 162,100 children were injured playing baseball during the previous year. But Mueller points out that these alarming data were collected in emergency rooms, where an injury may be tagged "baseball" even if it happened outside of organized sports—as when one child whacks another with a bat in the back yard.

In high school and college baseball, catastrophic injuries—those resulting in death or disability—are "almost nonexistent," Mueller says.

Even so, the perception of danger has inspired some leagues to require new kinds of safety equipment. While no one doubts that batting helmets are essential, there isn't much information about the effectiveness of other protective gear. "Right now," Mueller says, "people are asking, `Should we use a facemask on our batting helmets? Should we use a chest protector for the batter? Should we use a softer ball?' And nobody knows. We're going to try to answer some of those questions."

Mueller and Steve Marshall, a graduate student, are collecting data in a nationwide study of more than 5,400 leagues affiliated with Little League Baseball, Inc. They will correlate injury data with information about the use of protective equipment, to see if they can learn which safety measures are working and which are not. As an official in several national sports organizations, including USA Baseball and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Mueller is also tracking investigations into the new, high-tech metal bats, which are suspected of causing injuries to pitchers and infielders by launching the ball at high speed.

But the biggest problem in youth-league baseball, Mueller says, may not be the ball or the bat. It may be the coach.

"People volunteer to coach," Mueller says, "and that's great. But many of these volunteer coaches don't know how to teach the fundamental skills—how to play safely, how to get in good condition, and how to warm up."

Mueller advises parents to choose leagues that maintain safe fields and equipment, and to look for good coaches who emphasize fitness and fun. Beware, he says, of coaches whose primary mission is winning.

"In these youth leagues, winning should be the least of your worries," Mueller says. "The important thing is for the kid to participate and have a good time."

—Neil Caudle