Mark Wright still remembers vividly watching his son Trevor, who was 12 at the time, take a pitch to the cheek and drop to the ground in the batter’s box.
The video is still hard for him to watch, but he keeps it on his phone because his son was lucky. A “C-flap” that had been added to his son’s helmet limited the injury to a wire from his braces poking into his cheek. If not for the flap, Mark shudders to imagine what would have happened to Trevor.
“I mean, just drilled and dropped,” Wright told SN, describing the play that took place in May 2018.
The problem is, Trevor came close to not having his C-flap that day. About 15 minutes before the start of his game in Salinas, Calif., the first umpire to arrive instructed players to remove the flaps from their helmets. No real explanation was given, Wright said, other than that national Little League rules stipulated that they could not have them. The teams had just minutes to start unscrewing the flaps and removing them. The parents were confused and protested, with Wright particularly adamant that safety gear should not be removed. He had just bought a C-flap for his son because he’d gotten new braces at the beginning of the season and Wright wanted to protect his son’s mouth, so he stalled a little in removing Trevor’s flap. Around 10 minutes later, as about half of the team had removed their flaps, but not Trevor’s, the head umpire arrived and told them to stop.
Not because of anything other than a desire to get the game started.
“He got there and told us, ‘It’s game time, don’t touch these helmets, let’s go. We gotta start playing. Everybody leave it like it is,’” Wright said.
That meant that when Trevor went to the plate for his second at-bat and got hit in the face, his flap bore the brunt of the damage. It was still scary, but not nearly as bad as what could have happened. He was fortunate that the second umpire arrived when he did.
“It’s just by the grace of God this happens,” Wright said.
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What happened with Wright’s team is one case of a larger problem that’s happening around the country when it comes to what safety gear is permitted in Little League. C-flaps are almost ubiquitous at the major league level, but kids like Trevor are playing under guidelines that aren’t clear.
According to the Little League website (officials declined requests for an interview), making any sort of addition to a batting helmet might void the safety certification. Parents are encouraged to contact helmet manufacturers directly to find out. The safety certification of any equipment that Little League players wear falls under the purview of the National Operating Committee for Standards on Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE). Formed in 1970, NOCSAE develops standards for athletic equipment in several sports. While it doesn’t dictate the rules for Little League equipment, NOCSAE’s standards clearly play a role, even as the guidelines for what safety add-ons parents can get for their kids might be unclear.
“It’s my understanding that there are two issues that might be involved with decisions about Little League. The first issue is that they don’t permit alteration of any equipment that’s going to be worn. It doesn’t matter what the alteration is,” NOCSAE executive director Mike Oliver told SN. “As I understand it, you can’t buy something and alter the way it’s designed to work and still use that equipment on the field.”
Oliver, a litigation attorney in Kansas, said the second issue is that all helmets worn have to be certified according to NOCSAE’s standard. But again, there’s a lack of clarity. Whether a helmet is certified is still the job of the manufacturer, and to Oliver’s knowledge, no manufacturer has stripped a certification because of an add-on like a C-flap.
Helmets should have a label inside that indicates the length of the certification, and that generally runs five years from the date of manufacture or two years from the date of purchase, Oliver said. But unless parents contact a helmet manufacturer directly and ask whether adding a C-flap will affect the certification, they won’t know.
Wright said that his local league in Hollister, Calif., has determined that for the 2019 season no players can use a C-flap. Both NOCSAE and Little League encourage the use of a full face mask, but even that has to be attached directly by the manufacturer. Oliver said that some of the concern over add-ons comes from the variables when they are installed by a parent, coach or anyone other than the company that made the helmet. There’s no way to see how the purchaser attached the C-flap to the helmet. Even if they followed directions, the manufacturer can’t know how well it was done. And there’s the question of whether drilling holes to attach these flaps weakens the integrity of the helmet.
This makes sense from the helmet manufacturer’s perspective, but it affects the companies that make C-flap add-ons.
“Sales were doubling and tripling the last four years, and then last May, NOCSAE came out with a press release stating that any add-on to a batting helmet could cause that batting helmet to lose its certification,” Herb Markwort, president of Markwort Sporting Goods, told SN. “At that point, no helmet had lost its certification.”
Markwort’s company, based in St. Louis, has had a written agreement with NOCSAE since 2005 to allow use of the C-flap, and he said he has asked NOCSAE for years to develop a standard since 2004, but it has declined.
“We have a standard face protection that provides protection for the entire face, not just the cheek,” Oliver said.
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NOCSAE’s stance is that it makes more sense to cover the entire face and not just the cheek, he said.
“Why would I take one that covers only about 20 percent of the face?” Oliver said of the C-flap. “It doesn’t protect the eyes, doesn’t protect the nose.”
But face masks aren’t commonly worn at the Little League level — Markwort believes that it’s because it gets in the way of the batter’s line of sight — and they aren’t worn at all in the majors. But the C-flap is, and by many players. Some have opted to wear them preemptively, while others made the change after being hit by a pitch.
“You’re talking about stuff that changes somebody’s life,” said Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward, who started wearing a C-flap after a pitch broke his jaw in August 2013 while he was with the Braves.
Heyward still has a metal plate in his jaw because of it, and at the time he said that he started wearing a C-flap because it was either that or not play at all.
Wright’s son could have suffered a similar injury if not for wearing a C-flap. In 2013, Heyward had two breaks in his jaw. Wright said that his son’s flap was cracked in three places. Heyward missed about a month. Trevor was able to take his next at-bat.
Many helmet manufacturers do produce helmets with the flap preattached, but Markwort worries that he’s just being squeezed out of the business. After the video of Trevor being hit by a pitch made it to him, Markwort sent a box of his flaps to Wright to distribute to the other kids in Trevor’s league. Wright wonders whether the lack of clarity and push toward the mask is just a ploy to get parents to buy a certain product.
“What is this about? Is it about safety, or is it a marketing scheme to get us all to buy a particular kind of helmet?” Wright said.
Wright, an auctioneer in southern California, and the parents in his son’s league have for now decided to just continue using the C-flaps.
“And let the national level duke it out with whatever the hell they’re doing,” Wright said.
Whether or not those kids’ parents feel like they can attach those C-flaps and not break a rule is a problem NOCSAE and Little League have yet to resolve, and there’s no indication from either entity that they will anytime soon. So parents and coaches are often left with uncertainty.
“When you’re talking about introducing kids to the game of baseball, any one of us in here could tell you, we’ve seen that one kid who got hit in the face, and they were done with baseball at a young age,” Heyward said. “So we should try to prevent that from happening.”