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Despite its whizzing fastballs and screaming line drives, baseball today is not an especially dangerous sport. But for many years the national pastime was believed to lead all sports in injuries and fatalities, and by a large margin. Over the game's long history, hundreds of players, coaches, and spectators died at the ballpark, some of them in the most improbable ways.In this ground-breaking study, Bob Gorman and David Weeks cover more than 150 years of game-related fatalities. Providing the known details for each death, the authors also identify factors contributing to the accidents and discuss any subsequent changes to playing rules, protective equipment, crowd control, stadium structure, and the grounds themselves. Chapter topics include pitched- and batted-ball fatalities, accidents relating to weather and field conditions, ballpark structural failures, fatalities stemming from violence or risky behavior, and deaths by heart attack or other natural causes.