In 1998, more than 91,000 children and adolescents ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for baseball-related injuries, and nearly 26,000 children and adolescents ages 5 to 14 were treated for softball-related injuries. Baseball also has the highest fatality rate among sports for children and adolescents ages 5 to 14, with three to four persons dying from baseball injuries each year. This is sobering to we parents who grew up playing baseball on a nearby vacant lot.

Sports equipment manufacturers are trying to address our concerns about the safety of our kids, and the Crash Dummy Kids are helping us evaluate whether the new "safer" products actually live up to their manufacturer's claims. Softer baseballs is a new safety product promoted by manufacturers as substantially reducing the risks of head injury for children who play baseball.

Crash Dummy Kids helped researchers at the Institute for Preventative Sports Medicine, Ann Arbor, Michigan, when they tested the risk of head injury from a hard baseball and nine types of softer baseballs thrown at 60 miles per hour, a typical speed in Little League. The way the testing works is that the Crash Dummy Kids arrive at the test site, the researchers throw baseballs at them (well, actually, a machine throws the baseball) and load cells in the dummy's body report on the strength of the impact.

A study reported in the October issue of Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, showed that the softer baseballs provided only modest protection. One of the test series showed that a player without a helmet, who is hit in the head with a standard hard baseball has a 20 percent risk of serious head injury, and that this risk only falls to 12-l6 percent when hit with a softer baseball which when thrown at 60 miles per hour still has a force of impact of over 1,000 pounds. Obviously soft baseballs aren't a substitute for a batting helmet, and maybe we need to be thinking about using helmets all around, not just in the batting box.

Another study utilizing crash dummies was conducted to address the injuries and deaths from being hit in the chest. A previous study reported in the Clinic Journal of Sports Medicine (1992) had found that chest protectors and softer baseballs essentially provide no protection against death from chest impact.

The purpose of the new study evaluated current protective sports equipment that could favorably modify the incidence of chest impact fatalities that occur in baseball.

A child crash dummy and a fifth percentile female Hybrid III crash dummy were used to test chest protectors. The internal deflection and viscous response values obtained from the Hybrid III dummy showed minimal reduction in response when chest protectors were used compared to the unprotected dummy. When a generic dosed cell foam chest protector was hit by a standard hard baseball, the impact force increased between 6 and 43%, and the momentum delivered increased between 10 and I5%. When a softer core baseball was thrown against generic closed cell foam protection, the force measured increased between IS and S8%, and the momentum delivered increased between 14 and 18%.

The results for chest protectors were really bad! Closed cell foam protectors, including ABS plastic hard shell-covered generic closed cell foam, had only a marginal effect in reducing levels impact. The researchers concluded that the chest protectors and the various types of chest protector materials studied have minimal protective effects and may also exacerbate the impact force to the chest. To date, no effective preventive approach has been developed to eliminate or reduce chest injuries from baseball impact in the pediatric population. Not only are the new products not safer, but our kids aren't as safe as we thought!