In baseball, a line drive is a type of batted ball, sharply hit, and on (or slightly above) a level trajectory. The threshold between a line drive (also sometimes called a liner or frozen rope) and a fly ball can be subjective.
Line drives can be dangerous to baseball players and spectators. For example, on July 22, 2007, Tulsa Drillers first base coach Mike Coolbaugh was killed in a line drive accident at an away game with the Arkansas Travelers.
On August 18, 2012, Boston Red Sox pitching prospect Brian Johnson (at the time playing for Lowell Spinners) broke multiple orbital bones when he was struck by a line drive in a game at Fenway Park.
Famous quotes containing the words line and/or drive:
“I fear I agree with your friend in not liking all sermons. Some of them, one has to confess, are rubbish: but then I release my attention from the preacher, and go ahead in any line of thought he may have started: and his after-eloquence acts as a kind of accompaniment—like music while one is reading poetry, which often, to me, adds to the effect.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)