Friday / Weekend Open Lines


Since major league baseball began in 1876, there have been only two game-related deaths in the more than 200,000 games played. The first was in 1909, when Philadelphia catcher Doc Powers crashed into a wall chasing a foul pop-up, suffering internal injuries. He died two weeks later. The last occurred in 1920, when on this date at the New York Polo Grounds, popular Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was hit on the head by a pitch from the Yankees’ Carl Mays. Chapman died the next morning from the skull fracture. Roughly midway between those deaths, there were some 23,000 work related fatalities in a single studied year in the U.S. Today, with a much larger workforce, that figure is around 3,600. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau, online at <www.census.gov>.