Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper escaped a potentially devastating injury Saturday night when he slipped on a wet base and hurt his knee. Now, his agent, Scott Boras, wants Major League Baseball to take steps to prevent someone else from having the worst happen to them.
Boras called on the league to look into ways of making bases safer during games played in slick conditions.
“We go to great lengths with the soil to make sure it’s not wet and there are drying agents on the ground,” Boras said, via Jerry Crasnick of ESPN. “I don’t know what technology we apply or the studies that have been done on the composition of having a wet base. That’s certainly something we need to look into. This injury was directly related to inclement weather and a player putting his cleat on the bag and it slipping across because the surface was slick.
“In the NBA, when a player hits the floor and there’s perspiration on the floor, they clean it up immediately so the surface isn’t slick. In baseball, we have no one cleaning the bags between innings during inclement weather. Is there observation as the game goes where they would stop and make sure the bag is dry? We don’t do that. We don’t take measures like that for player safety that could easily be accomplished by the grounds crew and the umpires’ observations.”
Harper managed to avoid an ACL injury, but it looked very bad for a while. Boras has a point about how dangerous wet bases can be.
