Baseball, the American pastime, appears relatively safe compared with other high school sports, researchers report. Nonetheless, injuries do occur and many could be prevented, they say.

About 12 percent of high school baseball injuries result from players being hit by a batted ball, and nearly two-thirds of these injuries are to the head and face or mouth and teeth, said Christy Collins, of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

“We strongly recommend that at least mouth guards and eye protection be used by all pitchers, infielders and batters at the high school level,” Collins told Reuters Health.

Collins and Dr. R. Dawn Comstock reviewed baseball injuries that occurred at a representative sampling 100 U.S. high schools over two seasons, reported by high school athletic trainers to an Internet-based injury surveillance system.

Their findings, reported in the journal Pediatrics, indicate that 1.26 injuries occur per 1000 baseball exposures among high school players. By comparison, a previous report showed 5 injuries per 1000 high school rugby exposures.

Overall, most baseball-related injuries were ligament and muscle strains or bruises that resulted in less than 7 days of lost playing time, the researcher report.

Most injuries were to the shoulder and ankle (nearly 18 and 14 percent, respectively), followed by injuries to the head and face (about 12 percent). Injuries to the hand/finger and thigh/upper leg accounted for another 9 and 8 percent, respectively.

Compared with other baseball-related injuries, a greater proportion of those associated with being hit by a batted ball were to the head and face (48 percent) or mouth and teeth (16 percent). Eighteen percent of the hit-by-batted-ball injuries required surgery, compared with about 7 percent of injuries acquired from other baseball activities.

Collins and Comstock stress that efforts to make the sport even safer could significantly reduce injury rates.

“Future research is needed to investigate why face shields, eye protection, and/or mouth guards are not currently being commonly used at the high school level,” noted Collins.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, June 2008