Alex Hoskey at the time of the accident (left), and today.Photo: courtesy Alex Hoskey (2)
It only took one second for a night at Massachusetts' Fenway Park to become one Stephanie Wapenski would never forget — for all the wrong reasons.
Wapenski and her husband were seated near the ballpark’s third baseline to watch their hometown Boston Red Sox play their longtime rivals, the New York Yankees, in one of the biggest match-ups of the 2015 season.
With the game winding down, Yankees' shortstop Didi Gregorius stepped up the plate and Wapenski watched from her seat as the slugger swung and hit a foul ball. The ball flew towards the third baseline and into the stands, hitting Wapenski in the head. The impact immediately split open the skin between her eyes.
“I saw him swing, I saw a flash, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the ball going somewhere else,’ " Wapenski, a longtime Red Sox fan, tells PEOPLE of that July night. “Then I felt the impact.”
While she doesn’t remember immediately feeling pain, Wapenski does recall putting her bleeding head into her hands and hearing her husband call for help. She was later diagnosed with a concussion, with the wound on her forehead taking dozens of stitches to close up. The scar is still there today.
Stephanie Wapenski at the time of the accident (left) and now.courtesy Stephanie Wapenski (2)
“A player struck the ball and it went up and hit me right above my left eyebrow,” Hoskey, now 14, tells PEOPLE of the Kansas City Royals game. “After having a CT scan it was diagnosed that I had a fractured skull and a subdural hematoma which is bleeding in or on the brain.”
Even now, Hoskey says she still has memory problems and troubles with loud sounds because of the incident.
Both Hoskey and Wapenski are calling on major and minor league teams to increase their safety standards at ballparks.
“When I hear about fans getting injured at baseball games, specifically from foul balls, I get upset, as this could be a non-issue if stadiums had full netting all around,” Skopp says. “I realized early on that these incidents were foreseeable and preventable, which is why I started Foul Ball Safety Now, in hopes for change.”
AnNBC Newsinvestigation from 2019 found there were at least 808 reports of baseball-related injuries at ballparks over a seven-year period starting in 2012.
“Netting currently extends far beyond the dugouts – from Field Box Section 79 down the third baseline, to Field Box Section 9 down the first baseline,” the team told PEOPLE. “We will continue to examine this issue along with MLB to ensure a game experience that is both safe and enjoyable.”
According toRateYourSeats.com, a website that crowdsources photos and reviews of sports and concert venues, nearly all MLB teams had plans to expand their netting in early 2020.
The Chicago White Sox were the first team to expand their netting from foul-pole-to-foul-pole in 2019, the website notes.
Manfred also spoke of the difficulties when it comes to installing netting at stadiums.
“It’s very difficult to extend netting all the way to the foul pole because you need to run cables over what would be inside the field of play,” he said. “The data does show that the risk of foul balls is less when you get out past these elbows. And, again, the stands begin to angle way from the field of play.”
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“The league has continued to leave their millions of fans in the dark about the predictable and preventable serious injuries from foul balls,” he says.
When asked what he hopes for the future, Skopp says he won’t be satisfied until all teams can guarantee objects used during the game won’t harm fans.
“[I hope] every ballpark and stadium can one day hang a sign in it,” he says, “which states no more maimings will ever happen at that particular ballpark or stadium from a baseball.”
source: people.com
