Tumgik
#by the time i post this it might be nearly 210 and this interview was only supposed to be from 2-215 sooooooo
izzy-b-hands · 1 year
Text
2:06 now, interviewer was supposed to call me at 2 to start things, not me call them (noted specifically in their and Indeed's instructions), but no call yet. Interview was supposed to only take 15 minutes, so the new game is how long do i wait before i message or call them myself and ask if something's come up and they need to reschedule lol
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newstfionline · 7 years
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Aung San Suu Kyi, a Much-Changed Icon, Evades Rohingya Accusations
By Richard C. Paddock and Hannah Beech, NY Times, Sept. 18, 2017
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar--Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and de facto leader of Myanmar, stood before a room of government officials and foreign dignitaries on Tuesday to at last, after weeks of international urging, address the plight of the country’s Rohingya ethnic minority.
But those who expected Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi to deliver an eloquent requiem for an oppressed people were disappointed.
In her speech, delivered in crisp English and often directly inviting foreign listeners to “join us” in addressing Myanmar’s problems, she steadfastly refused to criticize the Myanmar military, which has been accused of a vast campaign of killing, rape and village burning.
“The security forces have been instructed to adhere strictly to the code of conduct in carrying out security operations, to exercise all due restraint and to take full measures to avoid collateral damage and the harming of innocent civilians,” she said.
As she spoke, more than 400,000 Rohingya, a Muslim minority long repressed by the Buddhists who dominate Myanmar, had fled a military massacre that the United Nations has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The lucky ones are suffering in makeshift camps in Bangladesh where there is not nearly enough food or medical aid.
A stark satellite analysis by Human Rights Watch shows that at least 210 of their villages have been burned to the ground since the offensive began on Aug. 25. Bangladeshi officials say that land mines had been planted on Myanmar’s side of the border, where the Rohingya are fleeing.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi tried to mollify her critics by saying she was committed to restoring peace and the rule of law.
“We condemn all human rights violations and unlawful violence,” she said. “We feel deeply for the suffering of all the people caught up in the conflict.”
But, asking why the world did not acknowledge the progress made in her country, she also boasted that Muslims living in the violence-torn area had ample access to health care and radio broadcasts.
It was a remarkable parroting of the language of the generals who locked her up for the better part of two decades, and in the process made a political legend of her: the regal prisoner of conscience who vanquished the military with no weapons but her principles.
But she is also the daughter of the assassinated independence hero Aung San, who founded the modern Burmese Army. And she is a member of the country’s elite--from the highest class of the ethnic Bamar Buddhist majority.
Officials in Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s government have accused the Rohingya, who have suffered decades of persecution and have been mostly stripped of their citizenship, of faking rape and burning their own houses in a bid to hijack international public opinion. She has done nothing to correct the record.
A Facebook page associated with her office suggested that international aid groups were colluding with Rohingya militants, whose attack on Myanmar police posts and an army base precipitated the fierce military counteroffensive. In a statement, her government labeled the insurgent strikes “brutal acts of terrorism.”
It has been a stunning reversal for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 72, who was once celebrated alongside the likes of Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. The 1991 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to her for her “nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
There were worrisome signs from the moment she entered a power-sharing agreement with the military after her National League for Democracy won the 2015 elections.
Myanmar’s generals--who ruled the country for nearly half a century and turned a resource-rich land also known as Burma into an economic failure--stage-managed every facet of the political transition. The Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar Army is known, made sure to keep the most important levers of power for itself.
It also effectively relegated Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi to the post of state counselor by designing a Constitution that kept her from the presidency.
“It’s always a dance with the generals,” said U Win Htein, an N.L.D. party elder. “She needs to be very quick on her feet.”
“The army, they are watching her every word,” he said. “One misstep on the Muslim issue, and they can make their move.”
Yet even before the compromises that accompanied her ascension to power, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was already distancing herself from the hopes invested in her by the rest of the world.
“Let me be clear that I would like to be seen as a politician, not some human rights icon,” she said in an interview shortly after her release from house arrest in 2010.
Such a recasting of her role has disappointed Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates. In an open letter, Desmond Tutu, the South African former archbishop, advised his “dearly beloved younger sister” that “if the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.”
Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, was even more pointed.
“She should not have received a Nobel Peace Prize if she says, sorry, I’m a politician, and the norms of democracy don’t suit me,” he said in a telephone interview with The New York Times. “The whole world stood by her for decades, but today she has become the mirror image of Aung San Suu Kyi by destroying human rights and denying citizenship to the Rohingya.”
“All we can do,” he said, “is pray for the return of the old Aung San Suu Kyi.”
Through all of the current Rohingya crisis, and a swatch of military offensives against other ethnic armed groups, she was taken pains to publicly support the military.
“We do not have any trust in Aung San Suu Kyi because she was born into the military,” said Hkapra Hkun Awng, a leader of the Kachin ethnicity from northern Myanmar, one of more than a dozen minorities whose rebel armies have fought the Tatmadaw over the decades. “She is more loyal to her own people than to the ethnics. Her blood is thicker than a promise of national reconciliation.”
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has largely shielded herself from the media and has holed up in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s bunkered capital, which was unveiled more than a decade ago by a junta paranoid that the former capital, Yangon, might be vulnerable to foreign invasion.
Earlier this month, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi chose not to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where her stance on the Rohingya would surely have met with criticism. Just a year ago, as the nation’s new civilian leader, she attended the annual assembly and was celebrated by world leaders.
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theliberaltony · 5 years
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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight
Joe Biden didn’t get off to the start his campaign was hoping for in Iowa and New Hampshire. But the news has been better for him lately. He finished a (distant) second place in Nevada behind Bernie Sanders, his best performance of the campaign so far. And his polling in South Carolina has held up well, potentially positioning him for his first win.
As of early Wednesday afternoon, Biden is at 31.1 percent in our South Carolina polling average, giving him roughly a 10-point lead over Sanders, who is second with 21.4 percent. Tom Steyer is third at 14.6 percent, with everyone else in the single digits. If Sanders was hoping for a post-Nevada bounce, it doesn’t seem to be happening in the Palmetto State. The most recent polls for Biden, which conducted all or some of their interviews after Nevada, actually show him with a larger lead over Sanders than the ones before Nevada. And none of the polls yet account for House Majority Whip James Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden.
Still, 10-point polling leads in the primary are not entirely safe, especially with several days left to go until a state votes. So let’s look at how our forecast model views three plausible scenarios: a big Biden win (by 10 percentage points or more), a modest Biden win (by less than 10 points) and a Sanders win (no margin specified). As of Wednesday afternoon, the chance of these outcomes happening according to the model was 41 percent (big Biden win), 33 percent (small Biden win) and 23 percent (Sanders win), respectively. We won’t consider the outside possibility (3 percent) of a Steyer win.
In the model, performing strongly in states helps candidates for several reasons. For example, since the outcome in each state is partially correlated, if Biden does well in South Carolina, that would also be a favorable sign for him in other Southern states, a number of which vote on Super Tuesday.
But the most important mechanism is a polling bounce. That is, after you win a state, it tends to produce favorable media coverage and improve voter confidence in your chances, usually producing a rise in the polls. The model does not necessarily expect South Carolina bounces to be especially large; South Carolina doesn’t receive nearly as much media coverage as Iowa or New Hampshire. But even a modest bounce for Biden could make a fairly big difference in the overall picture of the race. And an emphatic Biden win in South Carolina would leave open the possibility of a bigger bounce. Let’s talk about that case first.
A big Biden win could reorder the race
Rather than project all the way through the end of the primaries — we’ll save that for later — I’m going to restrict our focus to what happens on Super Tuesday depending on these three South Carolina scenarios. Here, according to our model, is what the post-Super Tuesday delegate count could look like following a big Biden win in South Carolina. Keep in mind that these represent the average of thousands of simulations; individual outcomes will vary based on factors such as Biden’s margin of victory in South Carolina, whether anyone drops out before Super Tuesday, and so on.
Scenario 1: Super Tuesday after a big Biden win in S.C.
Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 4,100 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.
State Sanders Biden Bloomberg Warren Buttigieg Klobuchar Iowa 12 6 0 8 14 1 N.H. 9 0 0 0 9 6 Nev. 24 9 0 0 3 0 S.C. 14 31 0 1 1 0 Calif. 207 102 37 49 19 2 Texas 76 84 40 19 7 1 N.C. 32 42 26 6 3 1 Va. 31 33 25 3 6 1 Mass. 32 16 8 25 8 1 Minn. 26 8 1 8 3 29 Colo. 32 14 8 9 4 0 Tenn. 17 25 15 5 2 0 Ala. 10 27 12 2 1 0 Okla. 9 12 10 3 2 0 Ark. 8 10 8 1 3 0 Utah 16 4 4 4 1 0 Maine 10 4 4 3 3 0 Vt. 13 1 1 1 1 0 A.S. 2 2 1 1 0 0 Total 578 430 200 148 92 44 Pct dels 39% 29% 13% 10% 6% 3%
We’re defining a “big” Biden win as 10 percentage points or more. Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.
An outcome like the one in the table wouldn’t be a disaster for Sanders, by any means. He’d still be projected to end up with 578 delegates, on average after Super Tuesday, counting both delegates won before Super Tuesday and on Super Tuesday itself. In other words, Sanders would still pick up 39 percent of the total delegates awarded so far. Biden would be next with 430 delegates (29 percent), with Michael Bloombeg in third with 200 delegates (13 percent).
But you can also see how momentum could start to turn against Sanders. By “momentum,” I don’t mean something ineffable, but rather the shifts in the polls that could occur as the result of Super Tuesday, as well as decisions by other candidates to stay in the race or drop out.1
In the scenario above — after a big South Carolina win — Biden would be the plurality favorite in every Southern state on Super Tuesday, namely: Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and Arkansas. While Sanders would remain the favorite in every non-Southern state2 except Minnesota3 including — critically — California, where he has a huge polling lead and where 415 pledged delegates are at stake.
But even if Sanders racks up big margins in California, this isn’t a great outcome for him from a delegate standpoint. He’d only be about 150 delegates ahead of Biden out of a total of 3,979 pledged delegates eventually to be awarded.
And from a narrative standpoint — and the polling bounce that results from it — it could be fairly bad for him. Sanders might not get very many wins in the Eastern and Central time zone states that the media will cover heavily early in the evening. And the wins Sanders would get would mostly be in white, liberal states where he was expected to win — until California reports its results, but that creates its own problems for Sanders.
What’s wrong with California? Well, nothing, nothing at all. But California takes a long time — days and sometimes even weeks! — to count its votes since mail ballots there only need to be postmarked by Election Day. Moreover, those late returns often shift the margins toward candidates such as Sanders who do well among younger voters, since younger voters are typically slower to send in their ballots. Thus, the Super Tuesday media narrative could already be written by the time California reports reliable results, and the initial returns in California might underestimate Sanders’s eventual vote share there.
Moreover, in this scenario, commentators could rightly point out that Biden and Bloomberg had more combined delegates (630) than Sanders (578). Furthermore, the broader moderate lane — Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar — would have more combined delegates (766) than Sanders and Warren (726). That could give credence to the theory that the majority of Democrats did not want a nominee as progressive as Sanders.
Furthermore, those theories about “lanes” could finally be put to the test because other candidates might finally drop out after Super Tuesday. In this scenario, Biden would be a rather clear No. 2 to Sanders and nobody apart from Sanders and Biden would have an obviously viable path to the nomination. So Biden could gain further ground from Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar voters joining his camp if those candidates quit the race.
What’s more, the rest of the March calendar contains a lot of states that look pretty decent for Biden (Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi) or at least highly competitive between he and Sanders (Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona). You’d still probably rather be Sanders than Biden. But it would turn the nomination into a highly competitive race.
A narrow Biden win would leave him with some work to do
What if Biden wins South Carolina, but by a narrower margin? On the surface, it’s not that different from the scenario above. But a slightly smaller Biden bounce as opposed to a slightly larger one would allow Sanders to breathe a lot easier.
Scenario 2: Super Tuesday after a modest Biden win in S.C.
Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 3,300 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.
State Sanders Biden Bloomberg Warren Buttigieg Klobuchar Iowa 12 6 0 8 14 1 N.H. 9 0 0 0 9 6 Nev. 24 9 0 0 3 0 S.C. 18 24 0 2 1 0 Calif. 219 87 39 48 20 2 Texas 84 74 42 19 7 2 N.C. 37 35 27 6 4 1 Va. 34 28 26 3 7 1 Mass. 34 14 9 24 9 1 Minn. 28 6 1 8 3 29 Colo. 33 11 8 9 4 0 Tenn. 20 21 15 5 2 0 Ala. 13 22 13 3 2 0 Okla. 11 10 11 3 2 0 Ark. 9 8 9 2 4 0 Utah 17 3 4 3 1 0 Maine 10 4 4 3 3 0 Vt. 13 0 1 1 1 0 A.S. 2 2 1 1 0 0 Total 628 364 210 146 96 45 Pct dels 42% 24% 14% 10% 6% 3%
We’re defining a “modest” Biden win as less than 10 percentage points. Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.
Rather than trailing Sanders by about 150 delegates after Super Tuesday as in the first scenario, Biden would trail by around 260 delegates in this one. And Sanders would remain the favorite — although a narrow favorite — in Texas, North Carolina and Virginia, instead of having become an underdog in those states. Furthermore, the combined moderate lane delegate counts would longer exceed the progressive lane counts (Sanders and Warren together would have 52 percent of delegates to the moderates’ 47 percent), depriving Biden of that talking point.
What this leads to, most likely: Biden would be viable, but he would need some other breaks, namely (i) the other moderates to drop out and (ii) a really strong performance in the remaining March contests. And his goal would probably be to secure a plurality of delegates — or to at least get to a contested convention — with a majority being more of a long shot.
If Sanders wins South Carolina, he’ll be in great shape
Finally, what if Sanders wins South Carolina? Well, we’ll run through this quickly, because it’s exactly what you’d think: GREAT NEWS FOR BERNIE.
Scenario 3: Super Tuesday after a Sanders win in S.C.
Average number of delegates candidates win (or have won) in each state based on an average of 2,300 simulations of the FiveThirtyEight primary model as of Feb. 26 at 2 p.m.
State Sanders Biden Bloomberg Warren Buttigieg Klobuchar Iowa 12 6 0 8 14 1 N.H. 9 0 0 0 9 6 Nev. 24 9 0 0 3 0 S.C. 26 18 0 1 2 0 Calif. 254 50 44 43 21 3 Texas 105 50 47 17 8 2 N.C. 49 22 29 5 4 1 Va. 44 17 27 2 7 1 Mass. 41 7 10 22 9 1 Minn. 33 2 2 6 3 28 Colo. 39 6 9 8 5 0 Tenn. 28 13 16 4 2 0 Ala. 19 15 13 2 2 0 Okla. 14 6 11 2 2 0 Ark. 13 4 9 1 4 0 Utah 18 1 4 3 1 1 Maine 12 2 4 3 3 0 Vt. 13 0 1 1 1 0 A.S. 3 1 1 1 0 0 Total 757 230 228 131 99 46 % of Dels. 50% 15% 15% 9% 7% 3%
In a Sanders’s South Carolina win, no margin is specified. Steyer and Gabbard are not listed as they are projected to receive a negligible amount of delegates.
After winning South Carolina, Sanders would be projected to end up with just slightly more than half of all the pledged delegates after Super Tuesday. Moreover, there would be no clear alternative to him. Biden would be devastated by the South Carolina loss and might drop out. (Although with only three days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, that might make it less likely than it would be otherwise.) But Bloomberg would also enter Super Tuesday in a challenging position. And Buttigieg and Warren don’t have a lot of obvious strengths on Super Tuesday, either.
Of course, anything is possible. Sanders could win South Carolina on Saturday and then some scandal could emerge from out-of-the-blue on Sunday. But in all likelihood, Sanders winning South Carolina — one of more difficult states on the map for him — would put him well on his way to the nomination.
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reneeacaseyfl · 5 years
Text
‘We Needed to Do Something’: White Sox Unveil Extended Protective Netting
CHICAGO — When Miami Marlins outfielder Curtis Granderson raced into foul territory to catch a fly ball just before reaching the knee-high wall at Guaranteed Rate Field, he might have tumbled into the lap of 7-year-old Nathaniel Wolpoff.
But not on Monday night.
Granderson — and the wispy, sports-goggled Nathaniel, who was sitting in the first row with his parents — were spared any calamity by a new feature at the White Sox’s home ballpark: protective netting that extended all the way from behind home plate to each foul pole.
Such extensive netting, installed to save fans from searing line drives more than tumbling outfielders, is the first of its kind in Major League Baseball.
It will not be the last, as the sport comes to grip with a spate of serious fan injuries caused by foul balls. The Washington Nationals also extended their netting to deep down the foul lines before Monday’s game, which was rained out. The Pittsburgh Pirates, the Kansas City Royals and the Los Angeles Dodgers have pledged to push their netting to the foul poles. The Texas Rangers will do so in their new ballpark that opens next season.
“At least we can be first at something,” said Judy Wallenstein, a long-suffering White Sox fan who watched the game with her husband, Roger, from their usual seats near the third-base line.
The movement to bring even more protection to big-league ballparks has been spurred by increased attention on a series of serious injuries recently, including when a 2-year-old girl was struck by a line drive at a game in Houston in late May. She sustained a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain and seizures, according to a lawyer representing the family.
The images of Albert Almora Jr. of the Chicago Cubs, who hit the ball, weeping and holding his head in his hands after the hit drew renewed scrutiny on fan safety and calls for more protection.
The accident in Houston may have seemed like an outlier, but it’s an increasingly routine occurrence at major-league parks. Over the weekend, a 3-year-old boy was taken to the hospital in Cleveland after being hit by a line drive, and fans were struck in consecutive games at the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium on Friday and Saturday — one in the head by a ball and the other in the back by a bat that sailed over the netting.
M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred has resisted mandating more netting for every team or giving teams a deadline, choosing instead to leave the decision to individual teams, even as players have almost universally asked for a safer environment for fans.
All teams fulfilled Manfred’s request to extend netting to the far end of the dugouts before last season, but only after a young girl was seriously injured after being struck by a ball at Yankee Stadium late in the 2017 season.
Manfred, who declined to comment for this article through a spokesman, told reporters on June 20 that he was satisfied with how teams were proceeding. But Illinois’s two senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, were not. A week after Manfred spoke and one day after the Houston girl’s injuries were disclosed, the senators wrote a letter to Manfred urging him to compel teams to do more.
Durbin considers himself a baseball traditionalist, once taking the floor of the House of Representatives to preach about the sanctity of the wooden bat — and rail against the designated hitter and the lights at Wrigley Field. But watching a 2016 episode of HBO’s “Real Sports” that detailed several serious injuries to fans hit by foul balls got his attention.
“You don’t think that much about it because it seems so rare,” Durbin said in a phone interview. “It turns out it’s not that rare. The game has changed.”
He added: “The last time I was at Wrigley, in an exposed section with no netting, I thought, would I really bring my grandkids to this game? And the answer was no. I just wouldn’t do it until I felt like I had a safe place for them to sit.”
More and more data has shown that baseball games are increasingly dangerous for fans who sit near the field. Not only are pitchers throwing faster and batters swinging harder than ever, but more of those balls are being hit into the stands.
The website FiveThirtyEight found that nearly 14,000 more foul balls were hit last season than in 1998, when M.L.B. expanded to its current 30 teams — and that the hardest hit balls are reaching seats that are not protected in most stadiums. In tracking data from 580 foul balls this season, FiveThirtyEight found that every line drive with a recorded speed off the bat of more than 90 miles per hour landed in an area that was unprotected by netting.
The White Sox said they began considering extending their netting in May, before the accident in Houston or another one at their stadium in early June in which outfielder Eloy Jimenez struck a ball that left a woman bloodied and on her way to a hospital. The team owner Jerry Reinsdorf told his top executives to find a solution.
“It is not one incident,” said Howard Pizer, the team’s executive vice president. “There were just more and more incidents we were reading about. It’s just an idea whose time has come and we needed to do something.”
The White Sox extended netting by running the cable holding the nets to each foul pole, 210 feet in right field and 205 in left, and attached three additional guide wires to the second deck to secure it. No poles were required to support the netting, which is the same green-tinted mesh that is behind home plate.
There were additional ground rules: Treat the new netting like a wall; if a foul ball hits the net, the play is dead; if a fair ball hits it, the play is live. But they were so simple that the umpiring crew canceled a pregame meeting to go over them.
Not every ballpark may be so simple. Kevin Uhlich, the Royals’ senior vice president for business operations said it would take a week for engineers to devise plans, three weeks for the netting to be delivered and another week for it to be installed — though some of those steps must be taken when the team is on the road. The Royals hope to have pole-to-pole netting installed in August.
“There are things you have to work through,” Uhlich said. “Some fans don’t realize you can’t just tie something up somewhere.”
Still, the White Sox fans seemed largely accepting on Monday night, even if some did not particularly care for the new obstruction. Rick Aspan, a 20-year season ticket holder whose seats are in the front row on the third-base line, said the netting, which was inches from his face, left him feeling “like an animal in a cage.” But he said the team had done the right thing.
Curtis Wilson, who sat with his wife and 5-year-old daughter in the sixth row, said he could enjoy the game without worrying about their safety. Nearby, 11-year-old Ellie Vantholen said the view was fine. “The only thing that blocks my view is people’s heads,” she said.
For young Nathaniel Wolpoff, the game was the final stop on a vacation that began with the All-Star Game in Cleveland. He has now been to all 30 major-league parks with his schoolteacher parents, pilgrimages they began making four years ago from their home in San Diego.
So when Granderson caught the fly ball up against the netting and asked, with a smile, if Nathaniel was O.K., he had no problem saying yes.
Credit: Source link
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velmaemyers88 · 5 years
Text
‘We Needed to Do Something’: White Sox Unveil Extended Protective Netting
CHICAGO — When Miami Marlins outfielder Curtis Granderson raced into foul territory to catch a fly ball just before reaching the knee-high wall at Guaranteed Rate Field, he might have tumbled into the lap of 7-year-old Nathaniel Wolpoff.
But not on Monday night.
Granderson — and the wispy, sports-goggled Nathaniel, who was sitting in the first row with his parents — were spared any calamity by a new feature at the White Sox’s home ballpark: protective netting that extended all the way from behind home plate to each foul pole.
Such extensive netting, installed to save fans from searing line drives more than tumbling outfielders, is the first of its kind in Major League Baseball.
It will not be the last, as the sport comes to grip with a spate of serious fan injuries caused by foul balls. The Washington Nationals also extended their netting to deep down the foul lines before Monday’s game, which was rained out. The Pittsburgh Pirates, the Kansas City Royals and the Los Angeles Dodgers have pledged to push their netting to the foul poles. The Texas Rangers will do so in their new ballpark that opens next season.
“At least we can be first at something,” said Judy Wallenstein, a long-suffering White Sox fan who watched the game with her husband, Roger, from their usual seats near the third-base line.
The movement to bring even more protection to big-league ballparks has been spurred by increased attention on a series of serious injuries recently, including when a 2-year-old girl was struck by a line drive at a game in Houston in late May. She sustained a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain and seizures, according to a lawyer representing the family.
The images of Albert Almora Jr. of the Chicago Cubs, who hit the ball, weeping and holding his head in his hands after the hit drew renewed scrutiny on fan safety and calls for more protection.
The accident in Houston may have seemed like an outlier, but it’s an increasingly routine occurrence at major-league parks. Over the weekend, a 3-year-old boy was taken to the hospital in Cleveland after being hit by a line drive, and fans were struck in consecutive games at the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium on Friday and Saturday — one in the head by a ball and the other in the back by a bat that sailed over the netting.
M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred has resisted mandating more netting for every team or giving teams a deadline, choosing instead to leave the decision to individual teams, even as players have almost universally asked for a safer environment for fans.
All teams fulfilled Manfred’s request to extend netting to the far end of the dugouts before last season, but only after a young girl was seriously injured after being struck by a ball at Yankee Stadium late in the 2017 season.
Manfred, who declined to comment for this article through a spokesman, told reporters on June 20 that he was satisfied with how teams were proceeding. But Illinois’s two senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, were not. A week after Manfred spoke and one day after the Houston girl’s injuries were disclosed, the senators wrote a letter to Manfred urging him to compel teams to do more.
Durbin considers himself a baseball traditionalist, once taking the floor of the House of Representatives to preach about the sanctity of the wooden bat — and rail against the designated hitter and the lights at Wrigley Field. But watching a 2016 episode of HBO’s “Real Sports” that detailed several serious injuries to fans hit by foul balls got his attention.
“You don’t think that much about it because it seems so rare,” Durbin said in a phone interview. “It turns out it’s not that rare. The game has changed.”
He added: “The last time I was at Wrigley, in an exposed section with no netting, I thought, would I really bring my grandkids to this game? And the answer was no. I just wouldn’t do it until I felt like I had a safe place for them to sit.”
More and more data has shown that baseball games are increasingly dangerous for fans who sit near the field. Not only are pitchers throwing faster and batters swinging harder than ever, but more of those balls are being hit into the stands.
The website FiveThirtyEight found that nearly 14,000 more foul balls were hit last season than in 1998, when M.L.B. expanded to its current 30 teams — and that the hardest hit balls are reaching seats that are not protected in most stadiums. In tracking data from 580 foul balls this season, FiveThirtyEight found that every line drive with a recorded speed off the bat of more than 90 miles per hour landed in an area that was unprotected by netting.
The White Sox said they began considering extending their netting in May, before the accident in Houston or another one at their stadium in early June in which outfielder Eloy Jimenez struck a ball that left a woman bloodied and on her way to a hospital. The team owner Jerry Reinsdorf told his top executives to find a solution.
“It is not one incident,” said Howard Pizer, the team’s executive vice president. “There were just more and more incidents we were reading about. It’s just an idea whose time has come and we needed to do something.”
The White Sox extended netting by running the cable holding the nets to each foul pole, 210 feet in right field and 205 in left, and attached three additional guide wires to the second deck to secure it. No poles were required to support the netting, which is the same green-tinted mesh that is behind home plate.
There were additional ground rules: Treat the new netting like a wall; if a foul ball hits the net, the play is dead; if a fair ball hits it, the play is live. But they were so simple that the umpiring crew canceled a pregame meeting to go over them.
Not every ballpark may be so simple. Kevin Uhlich, the Royals’ senior vice president for business operations said it would take a week for engineers to devise plans, three weeks for the netting to be delivered and another week for it to be installed — though some of those steps must be taken when the team is on the road. The Royals hope to have pole-to-pole netting installed in August.
“There are things you have to work through,” Uhlich said. “Some fans don’t realize you can’t just tie something up somewhere.”
Still, the White Sox fans seemed largely accepting on Monday night, even if some did not particularly care for the new obstruction. Rick Aspan, a 20-year season ticket holder whose seats are in the front row on the third-base line, said the netting, which was inches from his face, left him feeling “like an animal in a cage.” But he said the team had done the right thing.
Curtis Wilson, who sat with his wife and 5-year-old daughter in the sixth row, said he could enjoy the game without worrying about their safety. Nearby, 11-year-old Ellie Vantholen said the view was fine. “The only thing that blocks my view is people’s heads,” she said.
For young Nathaniel Wolpoff, the game was the final stop on a vacation that began with the All-Star Game in Cleveland. He has now been to all 30 major-league parks with his schoolteacher parents, pilgrimages they began making four years ago from their home in San Diego.
So when Granderson caught the fly ball up against the netting and asked, with a smile, if Nathaniel was O.K., he had no problem saying yes.
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‘We Needed to Do Something’: White Sox Unveil Extended Protective Netting
CHICAGO — When Miami Marlins outfielder Curtis Granderson raced into foul territory to catch a fly ball just before reaching the knee-high wall at Guaranteed Rate Field, he might have tumbled into the lap of 7-year-old Nathaniel Wolpoff.
But not on Monday night.
Granderson — and the wispy, sports-goggled Nathaniel, who was sitting in the first row with his parents — were spared any calamity by a new feature at the White Sox’s home ballpark: protective netting that extended all the way from behind home plate to each foul pole.
Such extensive netting, installed to save fans from searing line drives more than tumbling outfielders, is the first of its kind in Major League Baseball.
It will not be the last, as the sport comes to grip with a spate of serious fan injuries caused by foul balls. The Washington Nationals also extended their netting to deep down the foul lines before Monday’s game, which was rained out. The Pittsburgh Pirates, the Kansas City Royals and the Los Angeles Dodgers have pledged to push their netting to the foul poles. The Texas Rangers will do so in their new ballpark that opens next season.
“At least we can be first at something,” said Judy Wallenstein, a long-suffering White Sox fan who watched the game with her husband, Roger, from their usual seats near the third-base line.
The movement to bring even more protection to big-league ballparks has been spurred by increased attention on a series of serious injuries recently, including when a 2-year-old girl was struck by a line drive at a game in Houston in late May. She sustained a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain and seizures, according to a lawyer representing the family.
The images of Albert Almora Jr. of the Chicago Cubs, who hit the ball, weeping and holding his head in his hands after the hit drew renewed scrutiny on fan safety and calls for more protection.
The accident in Houston may have seemed like an outlier, but it’s an increasingly routine occurrence at major-league parks. Over the weekend, a 3-year-old boy was taken to the hospital in Cleveland after being hit by a line drive, and fans were struck in consecutive games at the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium on Friday and Saturday — one in the head by a ball and the other in the back by a bat that sailed over the netting.
M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred has resisted mandating more netting for every team or giving teams a deadline, choosing instead to leave the decision to individual teams, even as players have almost universally asked for a safer environment for fans.
All teams fulfilled Manfred’s request to extend netting to the far end of the dugouts before last season, but only after a young girl was seriously injured after being struck by a ball at Yankee Stadium late in the 2017 season.
Manfred, who declined to comment for this article through a spokesman, told reporters on June 20 that he was satisfied with how teams were proceeding. But Illinois’s two senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, were not. A week after Manfred spoke and one day after the Houston girl’s injuries were disclosed, the senators wrote a letter to Manfred urging him to compel teams to do more.
Durbin considers himself a baseball traditionalist, once taking the floor of the House of Representatives to preach about the sanctity of the wooden bat — and rail against the designated hitter and the lights at Wrigley Field. But watching a 2016 episode of HBO’s “Real Sports” that detailed several serious injuries to fans hit by foul balls got his attention.
“You don’t think that much about it because it seems so rare,” Durbin said in a phone interview. “It turns out it’s not that rare. The game has changed.”
He added: “The last time I was at Wrigley, in an exposed section with no netting, I thought, would I really bring my grandkids to this game? And the answer was no. I just wouldn’t do it until I felt like I had a safe place for them to sit.”
More and more data has shown that baseball games are increasingly dangerous for fans who sit near the field. Not only are pitchers throwing faster and batters swinging harder than ever, but more of those balls are being hit into the stands.
The website FiveThirtyEight found that nearly 14,000 more foul balls were hit last season than in 1998, when M.L.B. expanded to its current 30 teams — and that the hardest hit balls are reaching seats that are not protected in most stadiums. In tracking data from 580 foul balls this season, FiveThirtyEight found that every line drive with a recorded speed off the bat of more than 90 miles per hour landed in an area that was unprotected by netting.
The White Sox said they began considering extending their netting in May, before the accident in Houston or another one at their stadium in early June in which outfielder Eloy Jimenez struck a ball that left a woman bloodied and on her way to a hospital. The team owner Jerry Reinsdorf told his top executives to find a solution.
“It is not one incident,” said Howard Pizer, the team’s executive vice president. “There were just more and more incidents we were reading about. It’s just an idea whose time has come and we needed to do something.”
The White Sox extended netting by running the cable holding the nets to each foul pole, 210 feet in right field and 205 in left, and attached three additional guide wires to the second deck to secure it. No poles were required to support the netting, which is the same green-tinted mesh that is behind home plate.
There were additional ground rules: Treat the new netting like a wall; if a foul ball hits the net, the play is dead; if a fair ball hits it, the play is live. But they were so simple that the umpiring crew canceled a pregame meeting to go over them.
Not every ballpark may be so simple. Kevin Uhlich, the Royals’ senior vice president for business operations said it would take a week for engineers to devise plans, three weeks for the netting to be delivered and another week for it to be installed — though some of those steps must be taken when the team is on the road. The Royals hope to have pole-to-pole netting installed in August.
“There are things you have to work through,” Uhlich said. “Some fans don’t realize you can’t just tie something up somewhere.”
Still, the White Sox fans seemed largely accepting on Monday night, even if some did not particularly care for the new obstruction. Rick Aspan, a 20-year season ticket holder whose seats are in the front row on the third-base line, said the netting, which was inches from his face, left him feeling “like an animal in a cage.” But he said the team had done the right thing.
Curtis Wilson, who sat with his wife and 5-year-old daughter in the sixth row, said he could enjoy the game without worrying about their safety. Nearby, 11-year-old Ellie Vantholen said the view was fine. “The only thing that blocks my view is people’s heads,” she said.
For young Nathaniel Wolpoff, the game was the final stop on a vacation that began with the All-Star Game in Cleveland. He has now been to all 30 major-league parks with his schoolteacher parents, pilgrimages they began making four years ago from their home in San Diego.
So when Granderson caught the fly ball up against the netting and asked, with a smile, if Nathaniel was O.K., he had no problem saying yes.
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