Peanuts not ballpark treat for everyone

Justin Fletcher, age 6, likes to attend big-league baseball games like lots of other kids, and Justin Fletcher has a severe peanut allergy.

Those may seem like unrelated facts, the desire to attend games and the allergy, but they are intimately related. So bear with me while I start over.

Justin’s parents are Lori and Jeff Fletcher. Jeff, as you may recall, covered the A’s and Giants for The Press Democrat and now covers baseball for AOL. A few years ago, little Justin ate some peanuts and immediately vomited. The Fletchers asked Justin’s doctor to do blood work and the doctor discovered Justin has severe peanut allergies.

“On a scale of zero to 100,” Lori told me, “if you are even at three, you must avoid peanuts at all costs. Justin is 100-plus, off the charts.”

People can be allergic to a variety of nuts but peanuts seem to be the worst. That means people who suffer an allergic reaction to peanuts can go into anaphylactic shock which, according to peanutallergy.com, is “a potentially fatal constriction of the airways and swelling of the throat.”

People die from anaphylaxis. And that brings us back to little Justin Fletcher, who never has suffered from anaphylactic shock, mostly because of Lori’s vigilance. Although one time a little kid at a buffet restaurant innocently gave Justin a cookie with peanuts, Justin ate it, said he didn’t feel well, sat on Lori’s lap and threw up all over her. Lori carries a pen with epinephrine to inject Justin for this kind of emergency.

There’s another problem for kids highly sensitive to peanuts. Forget eating peanuts. Sometimes they can’t even breathe near peanuts. Again from peanutallery.com: “In some extremely sensitive individuals, ingestion of even trace amounts of peanuts can stimulate a reaction.”

You see where this is going, right? Justin likes baseball games but baseball games don’t always like Justin. People want to eat peanuts while watching a game. It’s the American way, as it should be. But a little kid like Justin sitting around a bunch of peanut eaters could be risking his life. Lori didn’t want to take any chances, so she contacted the A’s and Giants and said she wanted to bring Justin to the Coliseum and AT&T Park. Were there any plans for a peanut-free game or a peanut-free section?

Both teams wrote back. Someone from the A’s wrote: “We currently do not have a peanut-free game planned at this time. This is a challenge because we allow outside food and beverage into the stadium and this is an item many people bring in. Please let us know the date you are interested in and we will do our very best to alert the Concessionaire and staff of the allergy and to not enter the area and make sure we locate you in an open area. We actually just had some guests attend a game last homestand with the same allergy and we prepared all staff for this and to my knowledge there were not any issues that the guests had.”

One time Lori took Justin to an A’s game and the A’s sat them in the alcohol-free section. That worked fine because Justin and Lori were the only ones there.

Someone from the Giants wrote to Lori: “We receive approx five to ten requests similar to this each year. I have accommodated folks with a broadcast booth in the past if they were willing to purchase Club Level seating, but it was not easy to accomplish, and with an increase in occupancy from Spanish-speaking broadcasts and special requests, it has become impossible. We have been advised that if you are allergic to peanut shell and peanut fragment debris there is no way to protect you in this environment (a very windy ballpark). There is a possibility in the future that we will designate an unoccupied executive suite for one or two games each season to be a peanut-free box, but again if the allergy is so severe that dust from peanut consumption nearby could adversely affect you this may not be a viable solution.”

The A’s were able to be more accommodating than the Giants, I believe, because they don’t get as many fans and therefore can more easily designate a peanut-free section, and their ballpark is not that windy. The Giants have a windy park and they get lots of fans and can’t spare a section.

None of this is to put down the Giants. It’s to indicate a serious problem exists for certain kids.

Other teams work to solve this problem. The Detroit Tigers, Arizona Diamondbacks and Minnesota Twins provide peanut-free suites for selected games. The St. Louis Cardinals designate peanut-free sections for certain games.

A Web site, started just this season, lets fans know about peanut-free games. It is called peanutfreebaseball.com and it’s a godsend for parents like the Fletchers.

One other thing you should know. For reasons medicine does not fully understand, peanut allergy, along with other food allergies, is increasing in the U.S. Kids used to outgrow peanut allergy. Not so much any more. This problem is getting bigger and baseball should pay attention.

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular go to the Cohn Zohn at http://blog.pressdemocrat.com/cohn. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at 521-5486 or lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.