Caveness Has Her Guard Up for Baseball

If baseball is a field of dreams, Lorine Caveness is an all-star, perhaps even a Hall-of-Famer. A column inch or so may yet be reserved for her in future editions of “The Baseball Encyclopedia.” Because for 23 years, the 57-year-old mother of four and former elementary school teacher from Roanoke, Va., has spent most of her days quite literally trying to change the face of baseball.

“I’ve been at it for a long time,” says Caveness, sounding like a veteran pitcher who has lost the pop on her fastball. But, instilled with a gamer’s never-give-up attitude, she can still throw a knee-bending curve when it comes to arguing for safety in the game -- and for the odd-looking, transparent, thermoplastic Home Safe Face Guard she invented to provide heads-up protection for future Tony Conigliaros.

“Facial injuries are the most serious. And after years of working with this, we found out that eye injuries are certainly a real problem,” says Caveness. “Too many injuries occur, and baseball is too much a part of the American scene not to make it what it should be.”

Some people answer the baseball muse by obsessively landscaping ball fields out of cornfields; others sit at the kitchen table, cutting and pasting prototypes of safe headgear for batters and base runners from cardboard and construction paper. That’s what Caveness instinctively did the summer of ‘68, the afternoon when her husband came in from playing backyard baseball with their sons and mentioned that one of the boys was afraid of the ball.

The image from news reports a year earlier of Boston Red Sox outfielder Conigliaro being struck down at home plate by a pitch, his cheekbone crushed, a retina damaged, his promising career tragically cut short, played repeatedly through her head. The season before, one of her sixth-grade students got beaned in the batter’s box and was in and out of hospitals as doctors struggled to save his eye.

She called sporting goods stores, even Macy’s, and was shocked to learn none of them sold any such protective baseball equipment, except for batting helmets and catcher’s gear. Then and there, Caveness knew she was meant to do something about it. “From that day until this one, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind,” she says.

The distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate in the majors is 60 feet 6 inches -- none too far when a hardball can be pitched at speeds up to 98 mph, and not always all that accurately. Fact is that ball players at all levels of the game get hit by the ball, by errant or purposeful pitches, by thrown bats, by hit balls as they run bases. And people get hurt -- especially kids, says Caveness. “A major-leaguer or an adult player will turn away from the ball, but young people freeze,” she says. “It happens so quickly and they do not have the reflexes.”

Caveness can cite a heavy-hitting lineup of medical research and studies that substantiates those claims. A 1981 survey by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) estimated that of the 359,000 baseball-related injuries that occur annually to children, aged 5 to 14, almost half were to the head and face.

Subsequent CPSC studies ranked baseball the most significant cause of sports-related eye injuries from 1982 to 1985 (dropping second to basketball by 1990). A group of Canadian ophthalmologists reporting on sports-related accidents three years ago in The Physician and Sports Medicine journal concluded that, “In the United States, baseball accounts for the most eye injuries. Most injuries were caused by the ball (92 percent) and most injured players (99 percent) wore no protector. ... We believe that the use of eye protectors in baseball must be encouraged.”

But 100 years of tradition sticks like pine tar to a bat handle. Changing baseball is about as easy as a Jim Palmer comeback, about as predictable as a Charlie Hough knuckler. As the game’s seventh commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, once said, “Baseball’s essential rules for place and play were established ... with almost no exceptions of consequence by 1895. By today, the diamond and the rules for play have the character of Platonic ideas, of preexistent inevitabilities which ... do not change.”

That hasn’t discouraged Caveness. After almost a decade of developing the injection-molded Home Safe Face Guard from lightweight but impact-resistant polycarbonate, the product became commercially available in 1977. Within three years, it broke into the majors and got some national visibility when Art Howe of the Houston Astros wore one after returning from being struck in the face by a pitch.

When the Little League team from East Marietta, Ga., came to bat in the 1983 Little League World Series, they wore the face guards and won. In 1986, another major leaguer, Don Slaught of the Texas Rangers, whose nose and cheekbone had been shattered by a pitch, returned to the batter’s box wearing the face guard. Each time the face guard showed up in a ballgame, Caveness thought maybe its time had come.

Still, even with total sales of the face guard nearing 250,000, game-wide acceptance of its use hasn’t come.

“She’s really worked her buns off for it and there hasn’t been a whole lot of headway,” says Richard Hilton, the coach of the East Marietta world-championship team who introduced the face guards to the local league after buying one for his son in 1981.

Hilton says he still has to defend the face guard once or twice a year to some new fathers who complain about its looks. “You get remarks,” he says. “It’s the macho stuff. ... But we’re trying to protect the children, and after a season, they’re glad we got them. You prevent one kid from getting injured and they pay for themselves.”

Other than the two injured players who wore the face guard for several weeks, and some experimenting with it in the minor leagues, the $15 face guard ($30 attached to a batting helmet) has been shunned by the big leagues. And while the Little League has approved the product since 1978 -- even put it on the cover of its equipment catalogues -- it has not required its use for the 2.5 million 6-to-18-year-olds worldwide. Not that Caveness hasn’t leaned on the league. “The very best thing would be for the Little League to mandate it,” she says.

From Little League headquarters in Williamsport, Pa., spokesman Stephen Keeners explains that mandating such a change isn’t all that simple. He says the face guard most likely will not be made compulsory until the congress of 1,000 Little League representatives from around the country, which meets every three years, votes to do so. “Lorine is one of several manufacturers of that type of protective equipment; she is one of many people who has dedicated herself to making the game of baseball safer at all levels of play,” says Keener. “But, at this point, the people who know the game best at the grass-roots level haven’t felt it is necessary.”

Not to fear. That the Home Safe Face Guard is displayed at the top perch of the helmet protection exhibit at Little League Baseball’s International Museum convinces Caveness that, despite resistance from “the powers that be,” her face guard and baseball have an evolutionary appointment in the near future.