Erickson v. Lexington Baseball Club

• Decision Date: 23 May 1951
• Docket Number: No. 666,666
• Citation: 233 N.C. 627,65 S.E.2d 140
• Parties: ERICKSON, v. LEXINGTON BASEBALL CLUB, Inc.
• Court: North Carolina Supreme Court

Page 140

65 S.E.2d 140

233 N.C. 627

ERICKSON, v. LEXINGTON BASEBALL CLUB, Inc.

No. 666

Supreme Court of North Carolina.

May 23, 1951

Hubert E. Olive and S. A. DeLapp, Lexington, for plaintiff, appellant.

Phillips & Bower, Lexington, for defendant, appellee.

JOHNSON, Justice.

The plaintiff insists that his case should have been submitted to the jury on the theory that the defendant was negligent in not providing him with a choice between screened and unscreened seats. We are inclined to the other view.

This was a post-season, play-off game. Interest was at a high pitch. An unusually large crowd was in attendance, the like of which one witness said had never been seen before in Lexington. The grandstand and bleachers ordinarily seated about twenty-five hundred people. That night more than four thousand came. Play-offs like this seldom occurred. There was one admission price to all,--no reserved seats. It was a case of 'first come, first served.' The plaintiff reached the park about ten minutes before game time. All of the screened seats were then occupied. He was familiar with the park, having previously attended about a dozen games there.

The defendant's failure to provide the plaintiff with a screened seat under the facts here developed does not support an issue of actionable negligence, and Judge Clement correctly so held.

This is not to say that the management of a baseball park is not required to exercise reasonable care for the safety of its patrons. Nevertheless, it is not an insurer of their safety. Reasonable care is all that is required,--that is, care commensurate with the circumstances of the situation,--in protecting patrons from injuries. Annotation: 142 A.L.R. 868, 869.

And the duty to exercise reasonable care imposes no obligation to provide protective screening for all seats in the stands and bleachers. This is so in part for the reason that many patrons prefer to sit where their view is not obscurrd by screening. Nor is management required, in order to free itself from negligence, to provide protected seats for all who may possibly apply for them. It is enough to provide screened seats, in the areas back of home plate where the danger of sharp foul tips is greatest, in sufficient number to accommodate as many patrons as may reasonably be expected to call for them on ordinary occasions. Protected seats for an unusual crowd, such as was in attendance at the game here involved, need not be provided. Brisson v. Minneapolis Baseball & Athletic Ass'n, 185 Minn. 507, 240 N.W. 903; Quinn v. Recreation Park Ass'n, 3 Cal.2d 725, 46 P.2d 144; Annotation: 142 A.L.R. 868, 870 et seq.

Anyone familiar with the game of baseball knows that balls are frequently fouled into the stands and bleachers. Such are common incidents of the game which necessarily involve dangers to spectators. And where a spectator, with ordinary knowledge of the game of baseball, on finding all screened seats filled, proceeds to sit in an unscreened stand, as did the plaintiff under the circumstances of this case, he thereby accepts the common hazards incident to the game and assumes the risks of injury, and ordinarily there can be no recovery for an injury sustained as a result of being hit by a batted ball. Brummerhoff v. St. Louis Nat'l Baseball Club, Mo. App., 149 S.W.2d 382; Quinn v. Recreation Park, supra; Brisson v. Minneapolis Baseball & Athletic Ass'n, supra.

The plaintiff cites and relies on the decision in Cates v. Cincinnati Exhibition Co., 215 N.C. 64, 1 S.E.2d 131. However, the facts here are different. The cases are distinguishable. But even so, it was there said, as here, that management need not provide screened seats for unusually large crowds.

Nor was the plaintiff entitled to have his case submitted to the jury on the other theory urged by him: that the management of the ball park was negligent in subjecting him to an extraordinary hazard by allowing spectators from an overflow crowd to congregate in front of him in such manner as to prevent him from seeing and dodging the ball by which he was hit.

On this phase of the case, the plaintiff's evidence tends to show he was seated in the bleachers on the second row from the ground. In front of the bleachers was a mesh-wire fence about four feet high. This fence was about six feet from the bleachers in front of plaintiff's...