The AI Crystal Ball

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 When a pitcher is struck and killed by a line drive, baseball faces the reckoning it’s long avoided. “The Hit That Killed” imagines how tragedy would finally force the game to change — from padded caps to transparent mound shields — in a future shaped by loss.  

 On a misty Cleveland night in 1981, Len Barker turned seven thousand half-frozen fans and one slick baseball into pure symmetry — twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down.

 Before the fences rose and the cops lined the field, baseball’s biggest moments were mob scenes — from Chris Chambliss disappearing under a Yankee Stadium stampede in 1976 to the Philadelphia judge who finally ordered the game to get its fence back.