He was pitching. He wouldn't have had a helmet.
And the article says that the players were 18 or so. So, not really kids. This wasn't a Little League game.

Thanks for clearing the helm part up. Only things i know about baseball are you throw a ball and try to hit it.

Ahh someone was talking about little league. My mistake. Still sucks for the guy that hit it, but at least he should be able to grasp that there wasn't anything he could do about it.

This is what America gets for rejecting Darwinism for so long. Morons winning lawsuits filed for moronic reasons and awarded by a moronic jury.

When people are using aluminum bats to play baseball, thing are already heading downhill.

Ah, ok. Yeah, it's... a funny thing given the preponderance of high-speed hard objects flying around everywhere, but when it comes to protective headgear, at any point on a baseball field, you'll only find like three people wearing helmets: the catcher, the batter, and the home plate umpire. Everyone else? Soft caps. It's partly, I imagine, due to the fact that helmets are heavy and it's harder to see with the things on. And aside from the pitcher, other players are really far enough away that they can react in time to a ball hit in their direction, so there's no need for the helmets, anyway.
I was. I was simply mentioning that when I played baseball as a kid (in Little League) I wasn't allowed to use a wooden bat. My coach told me that the league rules said it was because aluminum bats were safer since even if they broke, they wouldn't crack and splinter and you wouldn't have flying shrapnel all over the place. I wasn't sure if that was the same reasoning behind aluminum being the standard for other amateur leagues, or if it was simply a performance thing: as in, aluminum bats perform better. And like I said, unquestionably, they do.

They still use it in professional leagues. I'm not too sure why aluminum bats aren't allowed in the MLB though.

Heh, that kid was weak if he died by a mere baseball. The world is thus spared of soft-skulled genes.

Leaving more room for thick-headed people everywhere.

Yay!

...funny thing about all this is the fact that that claim actually went trough. Only in USA... everywhere else, this would be dismissed right before it even reached a court, but yay for USA 'freedom' system that allows moronic actions. Then, americans at large wonder why the world has its laughs on USA's account... well, USA is just to damn funny (as in moronic) to be taken seriously...
Lets use a dangerous metaphor: USA is that silly idiot at school that rambles about all sort of righteous crap when all he does is talking bull. When finnaly no one cares about him, hes only on solution away from gaining respect: 'muscle'. Got the picture? :)
I'm sorry for all the fellow american GOG'ers, and while i don't intend to generalise, some of you must at least agree that this actually happens to be the case. Just look at news everywhere, about anything. These lawsuits are just part of the fun.