Dodger Stadium

While I'm on dangerous ground (see previous post Obsequious Fawning in the media), this whole thing about the San Francisco Giants fan being beaten up by some low-life residents of (I would guess East) LA is distressing on several levels, most of which are obvious.

Now, however, the media is reporting that the family of Brian Stow is filing the inevitable lawsuit against the Dodgers, part of the argument reportedly being that the Dodger organization did not do all it could have done to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

I'm as sympathetic to Brian Stow and his family as anyone, but I remember when Dodger Stadium opened about 1962. There must have been upwards of 100 million fans who have attended Dodger games there since then. How many fan beatings have there been during that time? I honestly can't remember a single other one. It's certainly an exceedingly rare event and one which the Dodger organization has an obvious interest in preventing.

If we can stipulate that fan beatings are so rare that no one can remember another one, on what basis is the attorney for the family going to credibly argue that anything else could or should have been done to prevent it? Seems to me they've been pretty successful. What should they have done -- had armed guards at every gate? Metal detectors? Oh wait, this didn't involve a gun, did it. How many different types of hazards is a business like this supposed to prevent?

This is the kind of
(not to mix my sports metaphors) Monday morning quarterbacking that, as an historian, drives me nuts: "Varus you idiot -- how could you not know the Germans were hanging out in the Teutoburg Forest?"; "Kimmel you ree-tard -- why weren't you ready for the Japanese 0800 7 December 1941?"; "Bainbridge, how could you not know that that [uncharted] sandbar in Tripoli Harbor would ground the Philadelphia while chasing them nasty Tripolitan galleys?"; "Nagumo you dummy -- you shoulda sent out a 5th floatplane at Midway", or "Chamberlain, I don't care if you were universally hailed as a hero after Munich -- look what happened later. It was your fault".

My point is that, after the fact, when everyone knows what was about to happen, and ignoring everything else that could have happened but didn't but which, apparently, it was incumbent upon the Dodgers to prevent, it's easy to say what should have been done to prevent what actually did happen. I refer to this as Hindsight 3.0 on the Dana Graham Scale of Hindsight (see my post in this Blog of February, 2009, on the Iraq War, in which different forms of hindsight are catalogued). What if an asteriod had landed in the parking lot? Coulda happened -- nothing between asteroids and the pavement to prevent it. And Frank McCourt is an expert on parking lots, is he not?

It is an unfortunate fact of life that bad stuff happens as a consequence of being alive, and while the above-mentioned [apparently] gang-bangers appear guilty as sin, it is they who are culpable. Going after the Dodgers to pay medical bills, just because they have deeper pockets, is difficult to justify.