Earlier this month, it was announced that every major-league franchise would be extending protective netting to the ends of the dugouts on each side of the field. For some, the move is probably long overdue. Late last year, for example, a ball off the bat of Todd Frazier hit and severely injured a little girl at Yankee Stadium.  The Cubs and Major League Baseball, meanwhile, were sued last year after a fan was blinded in one eye by an errant foul ball in August at Wrigley Field. By one 2014 estimate, as many as 1,750 people per year are injured by foul balls and broken bats at baseball stadiums every year.

But the law is a tricky thing, and the extension of netting might have an unexpected result — at least insofar as the teams are concerned.

There are many sources of laws. Some are statutes. Some are federal regulations. Some are court decisions. And some law comes from what is called a “Restatement.” A Restatement is basically a book which tells us what the majority rules are in certain areas of law. For our purposes, we’re going to be referring to Chapter 17A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. (As to why it’s not the “Second Restatement of Torts,” that is a concern beyond the scope of this piece, but it’s mostly because lawyers have an irrepressible urge to make everything unnecessarily convoluted.)

As explained in the Restatement, there exists in the law a doctrine called “assumption of the risk.” In the context of baseball, that basically means that if you sit in an area without protective netting and you know it’s a possibility that a foul ball might come your way, you can’t sue the team for getting injured by that foul ball. As one court put it in a case called Edward C. v. City of Albuquerque, a fan “must exercise ordinary care to protect himself or herself from the inherent risk of being hit by a projectile” — even if that projectile is traveling upwards of 100 mph.

There’s a really excellent write-up on this that you can read here. In short, however, this “baseball rule” represents the majority rule in the United States. If a foul ball comes your way at a ballpark, the law basically says you should have seen it coming. You’ll probably find language on your ticket saying you assume the risk of injury by foul ball, like the Yankees have on theirs.

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Editor’s Note: as Ben Lindbergh’s recent piece at The Ringer illustrates, reasonable people can disagree on the proper methodology and calculus for determining the players’ share of baseball revenue. What follows is a view based on one such interpretation.

Before he was commissioner of baseball, before he was even in baseball, Rob Manfred was a lawyer. A Harvard-trained labor lawyer, to be precise, who had a successful stint at the elite law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. In fact, he’s still a registered lawyer, with an active New York law license.

Yesterday, Commissioner Manfred held a press conference that might have made Labor Lawyer Manfred cringe.

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In 2009, the City of Miami and County of Miami-Dade agreed to pay for 75% of a new stadium for Jeffrey Loria’s Miami Marlins. The projected stadium cost was $645 million, so Miami and Miami-Dade — or, more technically, Miami and Miami-Dade taxpayers — agreed to cover up to $480 million of stadium-building costs, largely from from hotel taxes. (According to some reports, Miami and Miami-Dade ended up paying about $347 million.) Miami and Miami-Dade also agreed not to receive any of the money from the stadium at all. No money from ticket sales, no money for concessions or naming rights. All Miami and Miami-Dade got in return was a guarantee that, if Jeffrey Loria sold the team, they would get a percentage of the net sale proceeds.

In October 2017, Jeffrey Loria did sell the Miami Marlins — for $1.2 billion. Under the terms of that stadium deal, Miami and Miami-Dade are entitled to 5% of the net sale proceeds. So good news for Miami and Miami-Dade, right? Well, not this time: Loria has told them he actually lost money on the sale of the team. So despite that gaudy list price, Miami and Miami-Dade stand to get nothing at all.

On the surface, Loria’s claim seems pretty implausible. After all, he bought the then-Florida Marlins in 2002 for $158 million, $38 million of which was a loan from Major League Baseball. Even after accounting for paying back the loan, that’s still a difference of over a billion dollars. Remember, though, that according to the stadium deal, Miami and Miami Dade agreed to receive 5% of the net proceeds (i.e. profits), not gross proceeds (i.e. the sale price), in the event of a sale.

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This represents the first post by new contributor Sheryl Ring. An attorney in the Chicago area, Ring will cover legal matters for FanGraphs. We’re excited to have her!

Until this week, Juan Carlos Nunez was most famous for having made a website for a fake company selling a fake product, in an attempt to convince the world that Melky Cabrera’s flunked drug test in 2012 wasn’t really Melky’s fault. Since those revelations, Nunez has been barred from baseball permanently and also spent a few months in prison for his involvement with Biogenesis. You would have been forgiven for thinking it would be the last you’d hear of Juan Carlos Nunez.

But if baseball is done with Nunez, it seems as though Nunez isn’t quite done with baseball. This week, Nunez filed a 30-page lawsuit against his former employer, Athletes’ Careers Enhanced and Secured, Inc. (ACES, for short), demanding $3 million in damages. ACES is one of the largest and most well known baseball agencies.  According to MLBTradeRumors’ Agency Database, ACES is the current representation for stars like Charlie Blackmon, Carlos Carrasco, and Dustin Pedroia among more than 50 other notable major leaguers. And in 2012, ACES represented Cabrera, as well. You might also have heard of ACES’ two most high-profile names, Sam and Seth Levinson, who are also named as defendants in Nunez’s lawsuit. Sam is the President of ACES; Seth is its CEO.

Nunez contends in the Complaint that the Levinsons knew about Nunez arranging for players to receive performance enhancing drugs like HGH from Anthony Bosch and Biogenesis and actually instructed Nunez to distribute those PEDs to players. Nunez says that better performance meant better numbers and bigger paychecks for players — and bigger commissions for the Levinsons and ACES. According to the Complaint, the Levinsons wanted Nunez to make Biogenesis a selling point in his pitch to get new players to sign with ACES. Nunez even namechecks a couple of stars in his Complaint, alleging that he personally, with the Levinsons’ knowledge and approval, arranged for Nelson Cruz to receive HGH in the early 2012 to help him recover from an infection. And Nunez also says that the whole fake-website debacle was the Levinsons’ idea. As you can imagine, there is a lot to unpack here.

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