page_title: Baseball Rule
section_title: Ice hockey
hierarchical_section_title: Baseball Rule / Applicability to other sports / Ice hockey
caption_attribution_description: English: Full view of the rink during the New York Islanders vs. Edmonton Oilers game on November 2, 2009.
context_page_description: In American tort law, the Baseball Rule holds that a baseball team or, at amateur levels, its sponsoring organization, cannot be held liable for injuries suffered by a spectator struck by a foul ball batted into the stands, under most circumstances, as long as the team has offered some protected seating in the areas where foul balls are most likely to cause injuries. This is considered within the standard of reasonable care that teams owe to spectators, although in recent decades it has more often been characterized as a limited- or no-duty rule, and applied to ice hockey and golf as well. It is largely a matter of case law in state courts, although four states have codified it.
  The rule arose from a pair of 1910s decisions by the Missouri Court of Appeals, both considering suits filed by spectators at home games of the minor league Kansas City Blues. In the first, considered to be the case that established the rule, the court upheld a trial verdict against the plaintiff, holding that his decision to sit outside the netting the team had installed behind home plate constituted contributory negligence and assumption of risk on his part.
context_section_description: Like baseball, hockey is played with a hard object that can leave the playing area and go into the stands at high speeds. As a result of this, rinks today have protective plexiglass shielding atop the boards. And like baseball, that shielding is higher in the areas where pucks are most likely to go into the stands: behind the goals. But unlike baseball, the gameplay is more flowing and continuous and requires fans to keep their eyes on a puck moving up and down the rink which may be difficult to see, much less anticipate.
  Hockey was first played in the United State in the 1890s; professional leagues had formed within two decades and the Boston Bruins, the first American team in the National Hockey League, began playing in 1924; on lower levels the sport was primarily played in Northeastern and Midwestern states with cold winters. Lawsuits over injuries from pucks leaving the rink were first reported in the mid-1930s.
  Since hockey was less established in the United States than baseball, courts of that era were willing as they had not been in the latter instance to consider a spectator's degree of knowledge of the sport, or lack thereof, as a factor. This yielded different holdings in different states. In the first two cases of hockey puck injuries considered by New York courts in 1935, the Baseball Rule cases in existence at the time were cited as precedent to hold that hockey teams or rink operators had no duty to screen all the seats, just enough for those who wanted them, and that "[i]t is common knowledge that the puck may leave the ice when the players are shooting for a goal."
  However, the Supreme Court of neighboring Massachusetts upheld a verdict the following year for a woman struck by a puck at Boston Garden, since it was the first hockey game she had attended and the usher who escorted her to her seat at center ice had not warned her that even with three vertical feet (1 m) of glass between her and the rink pucks could still come into the stands. Four years later the same court declined to disturb a jury's verdict in favor of a man who was injured by a puck as he was walking from his seat to use the bathroom. The defendant had argued for contributory negligence, but, the court said, the degree to which the accident could have been anticipated was a factual finding properly submitted to the jury.
  Citing the relative novelty of the sport, which had only been played in California for 12 years at that time, a 1939 appeals court in that state declined to apply the Baseball Rule to hockey in Thurman v. Ice Palace. The plaintiff had attended an intramural University of Southern California hockey game at the defendant arena, where wire screens had been installed at the ends but not along the sides, where Thurman was sitting when a puck hit her in the mouth. Through her father, she sued the arena, the student organization that sponsored the game and all its members individually. The trial ended in a directed verdict for all the defendants, and she appealed.
  The appeals court affirmed the individual defendants' motions for dismissal, but reversed the directed verdict for the entities. Rejecting both the New York courts' decisions from four years earlier, as well as the defendants' reliance on Quinn, the court distinguished hockey from baseball by noting that in the former sport, the puck is "ordinarily batted along the ice", so spectators unfamiliar with the game, like Thurman, would not expect it to become airborne. Therefore:
  The rule which has apparently uniformly been applied to baseball cases is, we believe, inapplicable to ice hockey games, for the reason that the average person of ordinary intelligence in this country is familiar with the game of baseball and it is reasonable to presume that such person appreciates the risk of being hit by a pitched or batted ball without being specifically warned of such danger. Hence a spectator at this nationally known game may ordinarily be held to assume such risk. However, the average person does not have the same knowledge respecting ice hockey or the risk of being hit by a
caption: High plexiglass screens around an NHL hockey rink
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