The Batting Helmet and the Decades Baseball Refused to Protect Its Hitters

In 1907, Roger Bresnahan, the catcher for the New York Giants, took a pitch to the head from Andy Coakley of the Cincinnati Reds and suffered a severe injury.

When he returned to the lineup, he wore a protective headpiece called the Reach Pneumatic Head Protector. The A.J. Reach Company patented the device in 1905. It looked awkward and drew ridicule, and Bresnahan wore it only briefly.

Thirteen years later, in 1920, Ray Chapman died after being hit in the head by a pitch. Nobody adopted a helmet. It would take another 51 years after Chapman's death for MLB to require all batters to wear one. The history of the batting helmet is a story about how long it takes baseball to do the obvious thing.

The Long Resistance

After Chapman's death, there were calls for reform. Frank McQuade, secretary of the New York Giants, and other executives pushed for mandatory helmets. Nothing happened. Players didn't want to wear them. The culture of the game treated head protection the same way it had treated gloves in the 1870s: wearing one was an admission of weakness.

In 1921, the Philadelphia Phillies' manager Pat Moran gave his players caps lined with cork cushioning. It was a minor innovation and it didn't last. In 1936, Willie Wells, a star in the Negro Leagues, was struck in the temple by a pitch and knocked unconscious. When he returned, he wore a modified construction worker's hard hat. It was practical, effective, and ignored by the white major leagues.

The next serious alarm came on May 25, 1937, when a pitch from Bump Hadley of the New York Yankees fractured the skull of Mickey Cochrane, the player-manager of the Detroit Tigers and one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. The injury nearly killed him and ended his playing career instantly. Within a week, the Cleveland Indians and Philadelphia Athletics were testing polo helmets during batting practice.

Still, nothing became mandatory. Teams experimented, individual players wore various types of protection, and the league talked about it without acting.

The Breakthrough

In 1941, the National League mandated that teams experiment with helmets during spring training. The Brooklyn Dodgers, motivated by recent beanings of their players Pee Wee Reese and Joe Medwick, became the first team to wear helmets during regular season games. Dr. George Bennett, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, designed the helmets after Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail commissioned him.

The Dodgers' helmets were an improvement over previous attempts but still crude by modern standards. Adoption was slow. Players wore them reluctantly or not at all.

The real turning point came in Pittsburgh. Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Pirates and the man who had integrated baseball by signing Jackie Robinson, was among the most forceful advocates for batting helmets. Rickey pushed hard for his players to wear them and worked with designers to improve the product. By the mid-1950s, the Pirates were wearing fiberglass helmets designed by Charlie Muse, an engineer, with an ear flap protecting the side facing the pitcher.

In 1956, the National League became the first to require all batters to wear protective helmets. The American League followed. But the requirements were initially loose. Some players wore plastic inserts inside their caps rather than full helmets. Enforcement was inconsistent.

The Final Push

It took another 15 years. In 1971, MLB finally mandated that all batters wear protective helmets at the plate. Players who were already in the majors at the time of the rule change were given an exemption, and some holdouts continued batting without helmets into the 1980s.

The earflap became mandatory for all new players entering the major leagues starting in 1983. Again, veterans were grandfathered in. Tim Raines, who debuted in 1979, was among the last players to bat without an earflap, doing so into the late 1990s.

From Bresnahan's inflatable head protector in 1907 to the mandatory earflap in 1983, it took baseball 76 years to fully require its batters to protect their heads. Ray Chapman had been dead for 63 of those years. The cultural resistance to safety equipment, the same resistance that had delayed the adoption of the glove, proved remarkably durable. Baseball moved faster on almost every other rule change in its history.