Artificially inflated

First, it’s guns, smoking, cliff diving, and Nalgene bottles. Now we learn that artificial turf is also out to kill us. Or at least ballplayers.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is “investigating whether synthetic fields contain a high concentration of lead, raising fears that athletes could ingest dust or particles from the playing surface.” This is obviously of great concern with the number of people having ever been affected soaring into the zeroes.

Even more of a concern, the Red Sox play tonight at Tropicana Field, where a synthetic surface will be on the prowl seeking to inject its dust particles into an otherwise already sick clubhouse. With this new information though, it is quite obvious that we can place the blame on the team’s flu outbreak squarely on the carpet up in there Toronto, where the Sox played three weeks ago.

Ryan Young of the American Spectator tries to calm the fury with some logical observations about the fibers. Go figure.

BUT WHAT IF, critics ask, in the heat of the game, a player ingests or inhales a dislodged fiber?

The problem with that question is that the nylons and plastics used in artificial turf are not exactly known for their digestibility. Our systems can't absorb them. The fibers don't taste very good, anyway. If one somehow gets into a player's mouth, he'll spit it out if he can.

That's fortunate because it doesn't take a lot of lead to cause harm to people. Doses as low as 100 micrograms per liter of blood can be worrisome. But artificial turf has been in use for more than 40 years now, and not a single case of lead poisoning can be blamed on it.

One thing that makes the recent scare even more ridiculous is that lead chromate has been falling out of favor for years, anyway. Newer fields aren't made of nylon, so it's no longer needed to prevent fading.

Why, then, is the press scaring people? Perhaps it's because we like to be scared. Headlines warning of urgent doom are great for circulation, even when they turn out to be untrue. When's the last time you read an article all the way through that said, "everything's fine, nothing to see here"?

So, in summation; playing a three-game series at Tropicana Field, probably OK. Sitting down and helping yourself to a generous portion of the Astrodome carpet for dinner though is probably not a good idea. Thank goodness the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is here to clear that up for us.