Mother sues Louisville Slugger over son's death

A woman whose son died in 2003 after being hit with a baseball is now suing Louisville Slugger, the manufacturer of the bat that hit the ball.

Debbie Patch's teenage son Brandon was pitching for the Miles City Mavericks when a ball hit by a Helena Senators batter struck him in the temple, resulting in a fatal injury. The batter was using a Louisville Slugger bat.

She believes that the Hillerich and Bradsby Company were aware that their aluminum bats created a high probability of injury and blames them because the bats are designed to hit a ball with extreme force. Well, heck, that's what Baseball is - hitting balls with extreme force with cylinders of wood and metal. Baseball isn't softball, nor is it wiffleball.

She believes the company should have placed a warning label on the bat.

I believe some things are so obvious that they don't require a warning label. It goes without saying that all sports carry an obvious risk. Where would one put the warning label during a football game, I wonder?

Kentuckian pro baseball player Ray Chapman was killed by an errant baseball during a Yankees-Indians game in 1920, even before the days of high-performance aluminum bats. No matter what kind of bat is used, the game is inherently dangerous.

We're increasingly entering a hyperlitigious world where the right to sue is becoming a speculative game, like daytrading or playing the Lottery. At this rate, we'll soon end up in a world where all food carries a warning that you might choke on it if you eat it. Where doorways carry a warning that unusually tall people might bonk their heads at the top. Where cars carry a warning that you might get smushed if you walk in front of one that's going real fast. Where stairways carry a warning that you might get hurt if you fall down them. Where steaming-hot coffee carries a warning that you shouldn't spill it all over yourself. (Oh wait, someone already did that.)

I certainly sympathize with Mrs. Patch for her terrible loss, but blaming a Louisville Slugger bat for an accident is not the solution.

High Five!

Nowadays, when someone says "High Five!", there's a very good chance they're making a Borat reference. But it wasn't always so. According to louisville.com:

"It will forever be recorded in etymology books that the late University of Louisville basketball player Derek Smith popularized, if not coined, the term "high five" during the Cards 1979-80 championship season. Whereas the gesture itself started decades before, the origin of the phrase — says none other than the Oxford English Dictionary — took hold in 1980 and found its first print use in an October 1980 issue of Maclean’s Magazine. Smith, it should be noted, did take credit for inventing the language."

Sure enough, a glance at Smith's findagrave page declares him the creator and the originator of the term "high five" not once but twice in the same short paragraph. (Turn to page 209 in your copy of Weird Kentucky for a closer look at Smith's larger-than-life full-body-pictorial gravestone.)

Problem is, there are many sites online, like Outsports, that name baseball star Glenn Burke as the creator of the High Five.

And then there's a site called National High Five Day which says:

"I received an email two weeks ago. It came from Victor Sleets, a resident of Eminence, Kentucky. Mr. Sleets had been introduced to National High Five Day by a friend who thought that based on his unique family history, he might be interested in the holiday. I spoke in detail to Mr. Sleets and his father Lamont on the phone, and based on what they told me about their family’s history, I have no doubt that the true history of the High Five can finally be revealed.

Victor’s father, Lamont Sleets Jr, known to his friends as Mont, is one of the greatest basketball players in Murray State University’s history. Twice named to the Ohio Valley All-Conference team, Mont’s true legacy has not been recognized until now: Mont Sleets invented the High Five as we know it today."

Wow, so maybe the High Five was invented in Kentucky after all? As Borat would also say: "Not!"

The National High Five Day page gives an explanation for Sleets' creation of the term and I have to say it has the same convoluted, reverse-engineered ring to it as when people of today, lacking an explanation for how a Kentucky town got its weird name, simply make something up. Sleets' explanation for how he supposedly invented the High Five is so ludicrous and unlikely-sounding in so many ways and on so many levels, I'm not even going to bother recounting it here.

How do all these wacky rumors begin, anyway? I can personally tell you that as a child growing up in the early 1970s, we were already doing the High Five gesture amongst ourselves, as a distinct separate gesture from the hand-slapping "gimme five" kind of hipster affectation. And it was known as the High Five, by that name, even then.

Wikipedia points out that examples of the High Five can be seen in 1966 footage of Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong, and in a 1941 Abbott & Costello movie during a song-and-dance routine called "Gimme Some Skin, My Friend", just to cite two way-prior examples.

I'm not certain why anyone even cares who created the High Five, or why Kentuckians seem to be so eager to lay claim to it. But that's just another instance of what makes our Kentucky so unusual.

Perhaps I'll start insisting that I'm the guy who started everyone saying, "I feel you, man". (It's on the internet so it must be true!)

Pete Browning

The original "Louisville Slugger", Pete Browning, is another of the many historical luminaries buried in Cave Hill Cemetery.

He played Major League Baseball as outfielder from 1882 to 1894 with the Louisville Eclipse of the American Association, the Cleveland Infants of the Players League, and the National League's Pittsburgh Alleghenys (later Pirates), Cincinnati Red Stockings (later Redlegs, later Reds), Louisville Colonels, St. Louis Browns (Cardinals) and Brooklyn Bridegrooms (later Dodgers). He was one of baseball's most beloved characters during his lifetime, despite his open and unabashed alcoholism; he played many an excellent game even while three sheets to the wind. It was certainly a different era.

World's Largest Baseball Bat

The World's Largest Baseball Bat leans against a building in downtown Louisville, and at 68,000 pounds it's certainly an enormous attention-getter for the Louisville Slugger Museum.

The Louisville Slugger bats have been manufactured here since 1884, and are the official standard bat of Major League Baseball. Currently, two of their galleries are closed for renovations and will be unveiled in April 2009. They're still conducting factory tours while the renovations are underway, however, and most exhibits are still on display.

Baseball's the only major "two teams of guys try to get the ball" kind of sport I remotely care about, and even then primarily for its mythic resonance. This place has that mythic resonance and then some.