Torts - Cases, Principles, and Institutions Fifth Edition, 2016a

Witt & Tani, TCPI 5. Plaintiffs’ Conduct
Accordingly, the order of the Appellate Division should be affirmed, with costs.
WACHTLER, C.J., and JASEN, SIMONS, KAYE and ALEXANDER, JJ., concur.
TITONE, J., taking no part.
Notes
1. Elliot Maddox. Elliot Maddox was a promising young member of a struggling Yankees
team when he was injured. He never played effectively again. Why did Maddox not sue the
Yankees? It was the Yankees, after all, that sent him out into the wet outfield and required him to
play. The answer is that, as Maddox’s employer, the Yankees were immune from suit in tort,
though they were responsible for any workers’ compensation benefits. Maddox’s action against
the city as owner of Shea Stadium and against the Mets as the stadium’s lessee is emblematic of
the way in which employers’ workers’ compensation immunity has generated pressure to bring
tort actions against more distant tort defendants.
Note that fifteen years after the New York Court of Appeals decided his tort claim,
Maddox was back in the news, this time for fraudulent worker’s compensation claims. After
getting work as a counselor in Florida’s Division of Children and Families, Maddox filed a
workers’ compensation claim based on the knee injury he suffered in Shea Stadium in 1975. Now
51 years old, Maddox claimed that he was “at home in Coral Springs and too hobbled to work.”
The Tuscaloosa News, however, reported that in fact Maddox was running baseball camps.
Investigators with the Florida Division of Risk Management say they videotaped
Maddox “walking, running, bending both knees, performing pitching windups and
carrying equipment” during the times he claimed to be too injured to report to
work.
Tuscaloosa News, Jan. 25, 2000, p. 3B. Maddox was arrested on charges of workers’
compensation fraud, grand theft, and perjury in official proceedings. He was eventually acquitted
by a jury on all charges.
2. “The Baseball Rule.” Primary assumption of the risk also finds application in the class of
cases brought by spectators at professional sporting events. The Missouri Supreme Court recently
had occasion to set forth the so-called “Baseball Rule”:
[A]n overwhelming majority of courts recognized that spectators at sporting events
are exposed to certain risks that are inherent merely in watching the contest.
Accordingly, under what is described . . . as implied primary assumption of the risk,
these courts held that the home team was not liable to a spectator injured as a result
of such risks.
The archetypal example of this application of implied primary assumption of the
risk is when a baseball park owner fails to protect each and every spectator from the
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