SAFETY FIRST

MLB's top priority: Protect fans as well as they do its players

TORONTO — Buster Posey was run over, fractured his leg and the reaction ultimately was to better protect catchers and lessen collisions with rules that limited how the plate can be blocked.

Ruben Tejada had his leg broken when devastated by a Chase Utley slide at second base of a playoff game and not long after that, rules were applied to better protect pivot men.

So, please spare me that fan safety is foremost on the mind of the commissioner, the teams and the Players Association. Because if it was really a priority, then protective netting would have been extended long ago to shield more fans in every major league, minor league and spring training ballpark.

Acting like that poor little girl struck in the head Wednesday at Yankee Stadium is the moment of enlightenment is as disingenuous as Captain Renault in Casablanca saying in mock horror: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” as he is handed his winnings.

Many have been hurt or worse for years, and the reality is most people in the game have voiced some version of being amazed there are not more horrible incidents.

Hopefully, though, as with Posey and Tejada, what happened with the poor little girl creates an urgency that did not exist at a high enough level before. I have been told commissioner Rob Manfred is using his bully pulpit behind the scenes to try to get every team to extend netting to protect more fans. A few teams already have joined in and a person in the know told me there is now expectation every team would fall in line by the start of next season. But that is mainly about hope and momentum without a firm rule demanding it.

That person said you wouldn’t want to have 27 do it, three not and be one of the three. To that end, Hal Steinbrenner and his organization should be ashamed that as of Friday they still had said nothing publicly about extra netting at Yankee Stadium. You don’t want to be the Red Sox with Pumpsie Green on this one — the last team to do the right thing.

I get that many fans have preemptively complained about hav- ing netting in front of them. There also were tons of complaints by players and fans about the changes in the rules around home plate and second base. Just like there was tons of complaining when seat-belt laws became mandatory in this country. You have to block out the knee-jerk noise to do the right thing. And you know why? Because in a manner of weeks or months it just becomes the new normal and the noise stops — but the improved safety keeps going.

Pretty much every seat in every Japanese major league stadium is protected by netting and the fans still come passionately to the games. The most expensive seats in every MLB stadium behind home plate are protected. That is where scouts sit to watch every pitch of every game without complaint that it’s hurting their ability to do their jobs. I sit with them in spring training and the netting melts away, you hardly notice it at all — and the technology has gotten better with the netting and it is less intrusive than in the past.

On the subject of spring training, I bought my dad a seat in a handicap area in St. Lucie last year that was perhaps 100 feet from home plate and had no netting.

This was a handicapped area. I moved him behind the plate and, thus, the netting. Again, I don’t know how more fans are not seriously injured.

We now have technology that shows just how hard every ball comes off the bat.

The ball that hit that poor girl came off Todd Frazier’s bat at 105 mph and Frazier even mentioned how that jumps on him at third base and he is a professionally trained athlete with a glove.

“They [the fans] don’t realize how fast it is really coming,” Frazier said.

But we do. There is no pretend- ing to be shocked anymore when a fan is injured by a flying bat or ball. If every stadium is not retrofitted by the start of the 2018 season then, referencing fan safety as a No. 1 priority will remain nothing more than a hollow talking point.