The consequences of last Friday’s brawl involving the Detroit Pistons, the Indiana Pacers, and several dozen drunken thugs won’t, I hope, be restricted to the players and fans involved, nor even to the NBA. What lay behind the riot was the justified fear athletes have of fans who feel comfortable shouting racial epithets, hurling blunt objects, and occasionally rushing out onto the field of play ready to fight. One day, if things continue on their present course, one of those fans is going to kill someone.

Of course, Ron Artest and his teammates should not have gone into the stands, but their actions were hardly unprecedented. Baseball’s history is full of such events, from Ty Cobb’s infamous assault on a double amputee who’d been heckling him, to the Wrigley Field fracas four years ago that saw 16 Dodgers suspended for brawling with loutish fans after one of them seized catcher Chad Kreuter’s cap.

These incidents are remarkable not only for their viciousness but for their relative rarity and disconnect from the game. When Rangers pitcher Frank Francisco threw a chair into the stands after being mercilessly heckled by Oakland fans this September, no one saw it as an indictment of baseball or society. Rather, it was seen as a ridiculous and idiotic aberration for which the involved parties alone were to blame.

This is to baseball’s credit; throughout its history, rowdiness has been a problem, and in the last 20 years much has been done to address it. Placing security guards near the dugouts, ending the sale of alcohol after the seventh inning, and refusing to televise fans rushing the field seem like obvious steps to take, but that is only because they have been taken.

These policies have generally been successful at keeping players safe from fans, and for a long time players weren’t even particularly wary of on-field incursions. At one Yankee game I attended several years ago, a young woman hopped out of the right field bleachers and began running towards Bernie Williams with an enormous banner calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. military from the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. As security guards made their way towards the outfield, she and Williams talked, and she gave him pamphlets and other literature, which he politely took and was seen reading between innings. The Yankee star certainly did not have the air of someone who felt he was in danger.

This very feeling of security, however, may have contributed to the ugly incident at Chicago’s U.S. Cellular Field in 2002, when two maniacs assaulted Royals first-base coach Tom Gamboa, causing him permanent hearing damage. The idea that people would actually run on the field and beat someone was so far outside what anyone considered possible that no one quite knew how to react. But when a copycat tried to attack an umpire in 2003, he was quickly stopped and justifiably thrashed by the Royals, White Sox, and umpires alike.

For all baseball’s successes in this area, there is still much to be done to ensure the safety of players and fans. In particular, the sense of intimacy built into many of the newer parks is an invitation to disaster.

This summer I went, for the first time, to Milwaukee’s Miller Park. It’s a wonderful place to see a game, but has one shocking feature. The visitor’s bullpen is recessed into the bleachers and surrounded by a short rail over which fans can watch pitchers warming up. This wouldn’t be terribly unusual if not for the fact that it’s no more than eight feet down from where the fans stand into the bullpen. The distance is small enough that I could hear Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson complaining to catcher Jason Phillips about a specific umpire. It’s easy to imagine someone hopping down and stabbing a player.

It’s one thing for Wrigley Field to have bullpens set up along the foul lines – the park is 100 years old, and there is nowhere else to put them. It’s quite another for new yards in Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, and Arizona, among other places, to be designed in a way that puts players at unnecessary risk by placing fans too close to the action in the bullpen or outfield.

Baseball is not basketball, and there is simply no compelling reason to leave players within arm’s reach of potentially malicious fans. Bullpens should be enclosed and more security guards should be posted at points where the stands are nearly level with the field.

MLB should look at these issues more carefully when approving ballpark designs because there is no way to make all fans behave like decent, civil human beings. The vast majority will, of course, but there will always be cretins like those who charged the floor last Friday in Detroit, ludicrously ready to fight with several enormous and enraged basketball players.

An even worse problem is the issue of people flinging projectiles onto the field. Wally Joyner once had a hunting knife thrown at him in Yankee Stadium, and Red Sox-Yankees playoff games have almost been called because of fans throwing debris onto the field. There’s no easy way to stop this – a beer cup full of ice, thrown from the upper deck, can cause serious injuries – but three commonsense steps might help.

First, there should be metal detectors installed at the gates of all parks. Second, the sort of bag searches that fans in places like New York and Chicago take for granted should be made even more rigorous, and fans in all cities should be subjected to them. Security starts upon entry, and it’s time for teams to get serious about restricting what comes into parks.

Third, MLB should lobby municipalities to prosecute people who throw debris on the field under the harshest possible charges. Carl Everett, playing outfield for Texas in Oakland, was once hit in the head with a cell phone hurled from deep in the bleachers. What is that, honestly, if not assault with a deadly weapon?

Steps like the restriction of alcohol sales and the threat of harsh penalties can do much to stop the criminal behavior that leads to ugly incidents, but MLB must do more to physically prevent fan violence. Making it more difficult to get at the field and making it harder to get weapons into ballparks are easy ways to do this. I fear that this will only seem obvious in retrospect, when someone on a baseball diamond sustains even worse injuries than Tom Gamboa did.