Death at the Ballpark A Comprehensive Study of Game-Related Fatalities, 1862-2007

Despite whizzing fastballs and screaming line drives, baseball today is not especially dangerous. But over the game's history, hundreds of players, coaches, and spectators have died at the ballpark.

This ground-breaking study covers nearly 150 years of game-related fatalities. Providing the known details for each death, the authors also identify contributing factors and discuss changes to playing rules, protective equipment, crowd control, stadium structure, and the grounds themselves. Chapter topics include pitched- and batted-ball fatalities, weather and field condition accidents, structural failures, violence or risky behavior fatalities, and deaths from natural causes.

Robert M. Gorman is a retired university reference librarian with more than 40 years of professional research experience. He received the 2009 Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award for the book he and David Weeks wrote, Death at the Ballpark (McFarland, 2009; 2d ed. 2015). He lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

The late David Weeks was a former research librarian at Winthrop University's Dacus Library. He and Robert Gorman received the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award in 2003 for the article "Foul Play: Fan Fatalities in Twentieth-Century Organized Baseball." He lived in Rock Hill, South Carolina.