Broken baseball bat leaves woman seriously injured

A US woman who was struck in the head by a broken baseball bat is in a serious condition in hospital.

Tonya Carpenter was taken to hospital last night with what police called life-threatening injuries suffered during the game between the Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox.

She was seated a few rows up between home plate and third base when Oakland’s Brett Lawrie broke his bat in the second inning at Fenway Park.

Ms Carpenter was bleeding from the head as she was wheeled from the field on a stretcher.

Alex Merlis, of Brookline, Massachusetts, said he was sitting in the row behind the woman when the broken bat flew into the seats just a few rows from the field between home plate and the third base dugout.

“It was violent,” he said of the impact to the woman’s forehead and top of her head.

“She bled a lot. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that.” Mr Merlis said the woman had been sitting with a small child and a man. After she was injured, the man tended to her while other people tried to console the distraught child.

Concerned about a rash of flying broken bats and the danger they posed, Major League Baseball studied the issue in 2008 and implemented a series of changes to bat regulations for the following season.

Multi-piece bat failures are down about 50% since the beginning of the 2009 season, MLB spokesman Michael Teevan said.

Though dozens of fans at big league ballparks are struck by foul balls each season, there has been only one fatality, according to baseball researchers – a 14-year-old boy killed by a foul line drive off the bat of Manny Mota at Dodger Stadium in 1970.