Milwaukee Brewers announce plans to extend protective netting before 2020 season

Add the Milwaukee Brewers to the growing list of franchises around Major League Baseball that have either announced plans for or have already extended the protective netting that surrounds the lower seating bowls inside their stadiums. In an official release to the media earlier today, the club proclaimed their intentions of extending the netting that shields fans from foul balls at Miller Park before the start of the 2020 regular season.

Fan injuries at stadiums has been a hot topic this year as several bystanders have been struck by foul balls and sent to the hospital in stadiums around the league this year. So much so that earlier this summer, two Senators from Illinois — Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth — called on all 30 teams to extend their netting from foul pole to foul pole. Beginning with the Nationals, White Sox, and Pirates announcing plans to increase the protection at their stadiums in late June, several other teams have followed suit. While the Brewers won’t quite go pole-to-pole inside Miller Park, it will be fairly close.

In their most recent letter to MLB, Duckworth and Durbin ask the league to furnish official data on the number of fans injured by foul balls, citing a study done by Bloomberg in 2014 that estimated that 1,800 spectators are harmed by batted balls each year. Milwaukee players are in favor of the additional layer of safety measures, with Mike Moustakas saying “I think it’s a really smart thing to do.” According to Travis Shaw, “[t]here’s just been too many incidents, especially little kids getting hurt. And it doesn’t impede the experience.”

Our beloved local nine will host the Kansas City Royals at Miller Park for an exhibition series on March 23rd and 24th, 2020, and the project should be completed by then.