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Montana Court Says Pitcher Needed Warning About Aluminum Bat

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Safer than aluminum, but still... Image via Wikipedia

The logic of the law twists and turns in mysterious ways. Take this recent decision by the Montana Supreme Court, reported today by Mass Tort Defense. Like most tort cases, it begins with a tragic accident: The pitcher at an American Legion baseball game was killed by a line drive to the head. A recording of the game showed that he had 0.376 second to react to the hit, and experts say he needed at least 0.4.

A jury heard the inevitable lawsuit and fingered the culprit: A Louisville Slugger CB-13 aluminum bat. They ordered the manufacturer to pay the family of 18-year-old Brandon Patch $850,000.  Their reasoning was odd, but only in layman's terms. It made perfect sense in the land of products liability.

The bat was defective, they found. Not because it was manufactured incorrectly, but because Louisville Slugger had failed to warn that it could deliver hits at a higher velocity (than what, they didn't say). Louisville Slugger's lawyers tried to argue that a) there's no evidence the pitcher in a baseball game would observe and heed such a warning and b) it had no duty to warn anybody other than the purchaser or user of a product.

No dice, said the Montana Supreme Court. Citing cases involving auto wrecks, tainted potatoes and improperly fumigated produce, the court said companies have a duty to warn not just consumers of their products, but just about anybody who comes in contact with them. In the context of baseball, it seems, manufacturers have a duty to warn anybody in range of a hit that an aluminum bat can impart "increased exit speed" to a baseball and that makes it dangerous, apparently more dangerous than a merely speedy baseball hit off of a wooden bat. The court goes a step further and decides that such a warning would actually have some effect:

Such warnings, if issued by H&B in this case, would have communicated to all players the potential risk of harm associated with H&B’s bat’s increased exit speed.

No mention in the decision on whether the manufacturers of wooden bats should provide a warning that their products impart "increased exit speed" compared to less popular, but eminently safer, foam-rubber bats.

The court also discussed the curious question of how the pitcher would have read and heeded this warning, since it would be on a bat in the hands of a hitter roughly 60 feet away. Warning labels alone aren't enough in the case of a bat that can impart "increased exit speed" to a baseball, the court determined.

A warning of the bat’s risks to only the batter standing at the plate inadequately communicates the potential risk of harm posed by the bat’s increased exit speed. In this context, all of the players, including Brandon, were users or consumers placed at risk by the increased exit speed caused by H&B’s bat. H&B is subject to liability to all players in the game, including Brandon, for the physical harm caused by its bat’s increased exit speed.

It's all good fun to point out the silliness of judges in such cases, but here's the really insidious part of product-liability decisions like this. Not only does the Montana court's ruling increase the cost of bats, or remove a perfectly good product from the market not because consumers want to be rid of it but because lawsuits make it economically impossible to sell. Here's the scary part: The court decided that since Patch was dead there was no need to inquire as to whether he would have heeded a warning about aluminum bats.

Testimony that Brandon followed guidelines and that his teammates quitusing aluminum bats and switched to wood bats after his death warranted submitting Patches’ failure to warn claim to the jury.

Keep using aluminum bats, and subject yourself to a lawsuit. Stop using them, and supply the evidence needed to prove that they were unsafe, perhaps subjecting the team or municipality to a lawsuit. You make the choice, and for heaven's sake, don't screw it up.