Callahan & Blaine

Sixteen year old Gunnar Sandberg is a varsity relief pitcher for the Marin (California) Catholic High School baseball team.  He was recently put in a coma after being hit by a ball during a baseball game. The young man threw a fastball during the last inning of a tight game – that ball pinged off the hitter’s aluminum bat and struck Gunnar above the ear at a speed of 100 miles per hour.

Part of Gunnar’s skull had to be removed to reduce the swelling in his brain, and doctors were forced to put him in a medically induced coma. Marin varsity baseball coach Mike Firenzi said that the accident was “the most horrific thing I’ve seen on a baseball field in 20 years of coaching.”

Gunnar’s father, Bjorn Sandberg, unequivocally blames the aluminum bat for the severity of the accident. He is on a personal crusade to remove aluminum bats from play for all but professional athletes. He believes the bats are too light with too much power to be placed in the hands of young kids, who are also not properly outfitted with safety apparel.

Other parents are on board, saying that they hope pitchers will be required to wear protective gear so that a tragedy like this one does not happen again. Parents in North Dakota and New York City have already been successful in banning non-wooden bats from high school baseball games.

Callahan & Blaine, California’s Premier Litigation Firm, is one of the leading catastrophic injury firms in the state of California. In fact, in the last five years alone our lawyers have obtained over $1.2 billion in verdicts and settlements, including a $7 million settlement for a cyclist who was left with a traumatic brain injury after being struck by a newspaper delivery truck.

Our success in litigating and negotiating personal injury cases comes from our uncommon approach; we handle each personal injury case as though it were a complex business litigation case, attacking it from every angle possible.

While our firm is located in Orange County, California, we handle serious personal injury, wrongful death and product liability cases nationwide. If you or someone you know has suffered a catastrophic injury or died as the result of a sports accident, please contact our California law firm for expert legal counsel.