Town strikes out in bid to dismiss lawsuit by visiting high-school pitcher injured in poorly built bullpen

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today a pitcher for Milford High School injured in a badly designed bullpen at a Hudson baseball field can sue Hudson for damages.

Hudson had argued that because the game between Milford and Hudson was in a town park, it was protected from legal action by a state law that limits liability in spaces open to the public at no charge. A lower-court judge agreed and summarily dismissed the lawsuit by the pitcher, who, on warming up, struck his knee on a timber in the narrow bullpen, causing an injury that required two operations to fix.

But the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that because the 2010 game was an officially sanctioned league game, the field was, in essence, an extension of the high-school grounds and that therefore, the public-space law did not apply.

The town does not dispute that, if a Hudson pitcher had been injured warming up in the home team bullpen, the recreational use statute would not shield the town from liability for negligence because of the special relationship the town has with its own students. But the town argues, and the judge concluded, that because the plaintiff was a pitcher on the visiting team and not a student at Hudson, there was no "special relationship" between the plaintiff and the town "that stands in the way of the normal operation of the recreational use statute." The consequence of such a ruling would be that the town owes a duty of care to maintain a reasonably safe bullpen for the home team, but need only avoid wilful, wanton, or reckless conduct in maintaining the visiting team's bullpen. This not only would be poor sportsmanship; it would be bad law.

Hudson has chosen to offer interscholastic baseball as a school-related activity for its students, but it can do so only if other schools agree to compete against it; otherwise, Hudson high school could offer only intramural baseball. Where the town, as it did here, invites a school like Milford to play a baseball game on the town's home field, thereby enabling Hudson students to play interscholastic baseball, the town owes the students on the visiting team the same duty of care to provide a reasonably safe playing field that it owes its own students.