Sec 106, Row C, Seat 5: Jana Brody’s Mother and the Crusade for Safer Baseball
On a sultry August evening in 2018, Linda Goldbloom was struck in the head by a line drive foul ball at Dodger Stadium. She died four days later. Seated next to her husband Erwin in the loge section of the storied ball field some 200 feet behind and above home plate, she never saw it coming. At the top of the ninth inning, the San Diego Padres batter had swung low, fouling the pitch. The ball skipped off the bat at an estimated 93mph, rocketing over the protective netting of the seating below to find Linda in Sec 106, Row C, Seat 5 – one of around 40,000 spectators in the stands that evening. In the immediate wake of her being struck, someone nearby said “Are you okay?” The reply was reportedly pure Linda; mildly, amusingly acerbic. “No, I am not okay.” It was the last full sentence Linda Goldbloom would speak in this life – 107 miles away in Santa Barbara, Jana Brody took a late-night phone call.
“We were out late,” says Goldbloom’s daughter, Jana. “We got home and around midnight the phone rang. The name showed it was my sister calling, so I knew something must be up. She just said, ‘Mom’s in the hospital, dad’s with her in the ICU (Intensive Care). They went to the ball game tonight and she got hit with a ball.’” Brody pauses. “I was… I was in shock.”
This coming Saturday, June 10 at 3 pm, at Tecolote Bookshop in Montecito’s Upper Village, Jana Brody will be discussing her mom’s untimely and arguably preventable death – and her own cautionary memoir – the aptly-titled Sit Behind the Nets! The book’s strikingly prosaic title speaks to its being both personal account of family tragedy and activist blueprint. When it occurred to Brody that the terrible accident put her mother in a woeful historic category, wheels started turning. To our common benefit.
“You’re going through this awful thing, and you’re bumping into friends and have to keep telling people what happened. And the reaction is “OMG! I’m so sorry! Is that a thing?!” Walking through the fog of her own and her family’s numbing shock, endlessly explaining the accident, it was some weeks before it began to dawn on Brody; how odd that the extremely rare manner of her mom’s passing hadn’t drifted into the public arena. Linda Goldbloom had been killed by a line drive at Dodger Stadium, and absolutely nobody had heard anything about it. The Dodgers organization hadn’t uttered a public word on the matter. “The reactions I kept getting from people – it was like ‘Whaaat?! How come I didn’t hear about this?’”
In Major League Baseball’s 150-year history, Linda Goldbloom is only the third fatality resulting from a baseball blasting into the stands. The last time it happened was in 1970, when 14-year-old Alan Fish was struck by a batter’s foul slammed just outside the first base line. Less rarefied is the ball-related injury in the stands. A Cambridge University Press study put that figure at a hair-raising ~1,750 incidents a year. However severe the injury, something called The Baseball Rule has, since 1913, effectively indemnified MLB and ballpark operators against legal harm when someone in the stands gets clobbered by a baseball.
Part of American case law (though increasingly challenged), The Baseball Rule essentially holds that a baseball team can’t be held liable for errant ball-related spectator injuries as long as the team (or in amateur baseball, the game’s sponsoring organization) has offered some protected seating in those areas where foul balls would most predictably cause an injury. That is, in tort law, stadium netting amounts to an indemnifying gesture of goodwill. The Baseball Rule is summarized in the disclaimer you see on the back of your game ticket. Because MLB netting has never protected every seat in a ballpark, the tenor – and indeed the result – of the disclaimer is this: “If you choose to sit in an unprotected spot in the stands and you get hit, that’s on you.”
When it became clear to Brody that the manner of her mother’s death was not, and would likely never become, public knowledge – and that people would continue to remain largely in the dark about the danger posed by wayward foul balls – she reached out by email to ESPN reporter William Weinbaum. As she writes in her book, “The simplicity of my plea was rewarded with a quick response. The reporter explained he was on a cruise abroad, and had remarked to his vacationing wife that this sad and important note should not wait until he was back in the office. I was thrilled someone wanted to listen. At last.”
Once the story broke, so did the journalistic dam. Brody was deluged with interview requests, and in the full daylight of that publicity soon parlayed her family’s devastation into a reformist steamroller, making public the danger to MLB fans not sitting behind safety netting, and haranguing MLB to better their fan safety record. Following some foot-dragging – and predictably insensitive potshots lobbed at Brody from tone-deaf and net-hating baseball fans – Major League Baseball began glacially expanding the protective reach of their netting.
Brody’s book is a rare hybrid – part paean to her vibrant, wisecracking mom, part ad hoc guide to forcing needed change on hesitant institutions. Thanks to Brody’s naturally buoyant life perspective, the book is never dour. “Since Linda’s death was caused by a ‘blunt force injury to her head,’ her body would now need a coroner’s report to rule out foul play – or in this specific case, to rule it in.”
Public safety is not always top of mind in the frankly transactional world of professional sports. Brody doesn’t just see a silver lining in the terrible accident that befell her mother; Brody helped install the silver lining. Hey, baseball fans – Jana Brody has helped make it safer to watch your beloved team from the stands.
Jana Brody will discuss and sign her book Sit Behind the Nets! on Saturday, June 10, 3pm at Tecolote Bookshop, 1470 E. Valley Rd. Call (805) 969-4977 for more information. Sit Behind the Nets! is also available online at Amazon Books and BarnesandNoble.com
