Breakaway Bases Can’t Get a Break

For 15 frustrating years, Roger Hall has been trying to convince baseball that his breakaway bases will drastically reduce the most common sliding injuries.

For just as long, he has been rebuffed at almost every turn by traditionalists unwilling to alter such an integral part of the game.

The mere idea of bases designed to break apart in a hard slide seemed to horrify the purists of the game. Most regarded Hall’s product as nothing more than a gimmick, like Charles Finley’s orange baseballs.

“Nobody was really concerned about a better product and that was what really irritated me,” said Hall, an Elizabethtown, Pa., inventor and longtime baseball coach. “They didn’t seem to care that these bases could stop a lot of senseless injuries.”

Baseball people may still not care, but Hall’s invention is getting some backing from an unlikely source -- the doctors who treat injured ballplayers.

Orthopedic surgeons at the University of Michigan who conducted extensive studies of the bases on local softball players say they all but eliminate the sliding injuries so frequent in the sport.

In the newest study released last weekend at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting here, the surgeons estimated the bases could prevent a staggering 1.5 million injuries a year and save more than $2 billion annually in medical care if used in the country’s softball and baseball fields.

“People are getting injured for no reason at all because they don’t know these bases exist,” said Dr. David H. Janda, an orthopedic surgeon who headed the study. “The bottom line is these bases work to prevent injuries.”

Janda’s study looked at injuries suffered in more than 2,000 softball games in Ann Arbor, Mich., played on fields with normal bases and with the new breakaway bases.

In one phase of the study, 633 games were played on breakaway bases and 627 on regular bases in the Ann Arbor summer league, where players ranged in age from 18 to 55.

The study found 45 sliding injuries on the regular bases to only two injuries on the breakaway bases. The cost for treating the injuries suffered on the regular bases was $55,000, compared to $700 for the two injuries suffered on breakaway bases.

Janda’s team followed up on that finding by analyzing 1,035 games played on fields all outfitted with breakaway bases. Two people were injured while sliding in those games, both suffering minor ankle sprains.

“Not only were the injuries drastically cut, there was not one complaint about the base breaking away too early,” he said. “You need horizontal force, not vertical force to break the base, and it just didn’t happen.”

Hall’s began his long search for a breakaway base in 1973 after noticing the severity and frequency of sliding injuries both in softball and amateur baseball leagues.

“A good friend of mine was seriously injured at second base and ended up losing his leg, while another lost his kneecap on a base when the metal anchor sheared his knee,” said Hall. “It didn’t take me long to figure out there had to be a better way.”

After five years of research and design, Hall came up with the forerunner of his current base, essentially a square rubber platform mounted flush with the ground with a base top that attaches with 20 strategically located flexible rubber grommets.

He installed it at fields around his Pennsylvania home and refined it over the years. Meanwhile, he tried unsuccessfully to sell it to different amateur and professional leagues.

“Baseball people are traditionalists and are afraid of change,” said Hall. “I’ve run into more ego problems with baseball coaches. Their theory is if you’re an advanced enough player you don’t need them. I say if you don’t need them my base will prove it. If you break it away you’re not as skilled as you thought.”

The San Francisco Giants eventually used an older, inferior, set of the bases in their spring training camp while Frank Robinson was the manager, Hall said, but his efforts to get other major league teams to try the perfected model have failed.

“I’d love to put these bases on a pro field and see what they can do,” he said. “What you have to remember is a breakaway base isn’t a breakaway base 99.9 percent of the time. It’s just that one time when the slide is too late and the runner hits the bag hard enough to injure himself that they will break loose.”

Janda points to injuries suffered by Mike Scoscia of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Gary Gaetti of the Minnesota Twins last year as injuries that could have been prevented with breakaway bases. An ankle injury that ended Tommy Davis’ career with the Dodgers in the 1960s could also have been avoided, he said.

“No system is foolproof, but it’s a safety measure,” said Janda. “The National Hockey League has gone to breakaway nets to prevent injuries to its players and that has cut injuries, but not nearly on the scale as this would.”

Janda, who says he has no financial interest in Hall’s bases, said he wrote to the head of Little League baseball about the bases and received no response. He said American League President Bobby Brown forwarded his study to team doctors for their imput and that the Houston Astros are planning to use the bases in spring training this year.

Hall, meanwhile, has terminated his licensing agreement with a California manufacturer who made about 2,000 of the bases and is seeking backers to manufacture the bases himself.

“If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t even try it,” Hall said. “I’m just grateful for Dr. Janda. If it weren’t for his study, my bases would have wound up on the scrap pile somewhere.”