Lightning and Baseball: A dangerous spring paring that can lead to preventable tragedy

Lightning at a baseball game or other outdoor events, catching people off guard, is a sight too common it seems. It's something we seem to see on social media each spring. Chris Vagasky, a member of the National Lightning Safety Council, says he’s seen it himself.

“It never fails that I’ll be sitting at home, deciding to relax, watch some baseball, and you’ll see lightning off in the distance, and they keep playing the game,“ he said

This drove him to study how often Major League Baseball games are at risk from nearby lightning strikes. His work; One Strike You’re Out, was published in the American Meteorological Society Journals in 2022.

Determining an unsafe distance to be 8 miles, he studied lightning near more than 9 thousand games across every ballpark in America from 2016 to 2019. The result confirmed Vagasky’s concerns.

“1 in 14 baseball games, so if every team is playing, at least one of those games is likely to have lightning within an unsafe distance.”

Vagasky found that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City had 24 games with lightning in that 8 mile radius to the tune of 8,559 total lightning discharges. Meanwhile, Busch Stadium had 19 impacted games with a total of 21,334 lightning discharges in that time.

As average temperatures have warmed, we have recorded more days with significant amounts of at least one lightning ingredient - Convective Available Potential Energy, or CAPE. 

Dr. Viktor Gensini at Northern Illinois University says it’s unclear how other thunderstorm ingredients could respond to additional warming. 

"Generally speaking though, if you increase the instability, increase the amount of CAPE in the atmosphere, you will have more conducive or more favorable conditions for thunderstorms and attendant lightning risk. "

Vagasky notes that the MLB rulebook puts the chief umpire in charge of calling any weather delays, UNLESS the team decides to implement an independent safety policy. He recommends that you be prepared to take action on your own.

“Get onto the concourse level,  get inside, enclosed, away from the bleachers. Those are ways you can stay safe when thunderstorms roll in.”

Regardless of what is going on around you, safety should be your number one concern. That means lightning safety at outdoor events this spring.