NEW YORK (AP) — When a fan flipped over the railing and fell off the 21-foot-high Clemente Wall in right field at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park on Wednesday night, it elicited memories of spectators who have died from similar falls at other major league stadiums.
Kavan Markwood was in critical condition as of Thursday after falling onto the warning track in right field just as Pirates star Andrew McCutchen hit a two-run double in the seventh inning to put Pittsburgh ahead 4-3. Markwood was tended to for approximately five minutes by members of both the Pirates and Cubs training staffs as well as PNC personnel, before being removed from the field on a cart. He was taken to the trauma center at Allegheny General Hospital.
Pittsburgh Public Safety, which includes Pittsburgh Police and EMS, posted on X Thursday that the “incident is being treated as accidental in nature.”
Fans died after steep falls at ballparks in Arlington, Texas, in 2011 and Atlanta in 2015.
Here’s a look at some safety measures instituted by MLB and its teams:
Ballpark railings
Railing heights at ballparks are team decisions based on local laws and codes. The railing that runs along the Clemente Wall is three feet (36 inches) in height, which exceeds the building code requirements of 26 inches, according to Pirates vice president of communications Brian Warecki.
Those rail heights have come under scrutiny at other ballparks after fans died. The Rangers raised the height of the front row rails at their former ballpark by as much as 12 inches to 42 inches in July 2011 after a fan named Shannon Stone fell about 20 feet.
The Atlanta Braves settled a lawsuit in 2018 with the family of Gregory Murrey, who died after falling from Turner Field’s upper deck three years earlier. Murrey fell over a rail that was 30 inches high — industry code standards mandated 26 inches or taller.
Foul ball netting
Until 2015, many ballparks had netting separating fans and the field only directly behind home plate. Following several incidents that season in which fans were hospitalized after being hit by foul balls, MLB encouraged teams to extend netting or screens to run dugout-to-dugout behind home plate in December 2015. Three years later, all 30 ballparks had netting reaching to the far ends of each dugout.
In 2019, a 2-year-old girl fractured her skull when struck by a foul ball at the Houston Astros’ stadium. The club later reached a settlement with the girl’s family. The following offseason, MLB announced seven major league teams would expand protective netting to the foul poles and 15 others would expand their netting generally to the area in the outfield where the stands begin to angle away from the field. The remaining eight clubs already had installed netting that extended substantially beyond the far end of the dugouts.
Alcohol sales
MLB does not mandate alcohol sales cutoffs, but most clubs have stopped selling alcohol around the end of the seventh inning for years. After new rules aimed at increasing the pace of play led to shorter game times in 2023, several clubs extended alcohol sales until the end of the eighth inning. Many of those teams have reverted back to the seventh-inning cutoff.
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