SUE! SUE SOMEONE. SUE ANYONE.
Anyone can play the “blame game.”
ONE OF MY FAVORITE emails, Advisen FPN, presented me with blog fodder this morning. It almost always has one or two items of interest.
Duluth woman paralyzed by driver who was 'huffing' sues 3M
FPN picked up this headline from the Duluth News Tribune1 that reported
- Walking along East Superior Street with her young daughter, the Duluth woman was struck by a driver who ran a red light and careened onto the sidewalk after "huffing" a chemical compound from an aerosol can.
Ashen Diehl, then 33, suffered a shattered vertebra, a collapsed lung, broken ribs and bruises all over her body. At 40, she remains paralyzed from the waist down, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
The driver, Robert Nicholas Buehlman, received a probationary sentence and, later, some prison time.
But Diehl is now pursuing another legal option. She's suing 3M, the Twin Cities-based multinational conglomerate that manufactures the dust-removal product Buehlman was reportedly inhaling at the time of the crash.
Did 3M make the dust removal product to be “huffed?”2
Did 3M force, suggest, or in any way encourage huffing?
A quick check in my garage turned up many containers, both aerosol and otherwise that insist the products be used in “well ventilated” areas. The only product with a specific warning is good ol’ WD-40. Written in capitol letters, the warning reads: DELIBERATE OR DIRECT INHALATION OF VAPOR OR SPRAY MIST MAY BE HARMFUL OR FATAL.
If Buehlman was a huffing recidivist, he HAD to know the vapors would effect his mental and physical capabilities.
Even sans a warning label a la WD-40, huffing has been around long enough and the dangers promulgated sufficiently that the dangers are well known.
How, then, is 3M responsible for Buehlman’s abuse of the product.
Perhaps Diehl should sue the city and the state for allowing Buehlman to be on the road in any condition. That is about as logical as suing 3M.
This is the same illogic anti-gun people are taking. Sue the gun manufacturers when some crazy shots at someone. Sue the ammo makers, too. And the governments that allowed the shooter to possess the weapon.
I know every lawyer tells his or her clients to “sue everyone,” hoping to find some deep pockets.
Ex-pitcher sues Astros, says sign stealing a ‘death knell’ for his MLB career
According to the Texas Sports Nation website3
- In the filing made Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, former Toronto Blue jays pitcher Mike Bolsinger accused the Astros, who have been penalized by MLB for electronic sign stealing in 2017, of unfair business practices, negligence and intentional interference with contractual and economic relations.
Perhaps the Astros didn’t play fair, but stealing signs is as common — more common — than stealing bases.
The person Bolsinger should be suing is the Blue jays’ manager.
If a manager is on the ball and if that manager detects sign stealing, the manager should trot over to the pitcher and the catcher and tell them to change their signs.
Do it as often as necessary.
Catchers are supposed to be among the most intelligent people on the team; surely they could manage to memorize multiple signs at least for the basic pitches.
The web site claims that Bolsinger is seeking unspecified “consequential and general damages” from the Astros, who the suit says “interfered with and harmed” his career.
Bolsinger may have a case. After getting bombed by the Astros and then being benched, he was sent down.
Before the Astros’ game, Bolsinger had an Earned Run Average (ERA) of 4.77. By the time he left on game day, his ERA had jumped to 4.92. In the minors his ERA was a respectable 1.70. He later played in Japan, compiling a 3.87 ERA in 232 2/3 innings.
- In 2019, the average ERA was 4.51.4
Sign stealing on both sides — catcher to pitcher and the bench to base coaches — has a long tradition in baseball. Everybody knows it, everybody does it, and every coach or manager should know how to combat it.
No secret.
The Astros did get their collective wrists slapped for electronic sign stealing in 2017.
- No, Virginia, the Astros didn’t steal an “electronic sign”; sports writers are not known for their command of English. What is meant is that the Astros used a camera in center-field to decode signs and then relayed them to hitters by banging on a trash can.
I can empathize, a little, with Bolsinger, but I think his “raw deal” came from his own teams’ apparently inept management that failed to comprehend what the Astros were doing.
Sources
1. Duluth huffing: https://tinyurl.com/thyudum
2. Huffing: https://tinyurl.com/yx6voqsq
3. Baseball: https://tinyurl.com/uuhsa3o
4. ERA: https://tinyurl.com/y9frv49k
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
Web sites (URLs) beginning https://tinyurl.com/ are generated by the free Tiny URL utility and reduce lengthy URLs to manageable size.
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