Yes, the Yankees also put a statement on their website in early August saying that they were seriously exploring additional netting, but they have said little on the matter since then. On Thursday, they issued a statement saying their “thoughts and prayers were with the injured girl’’ and that they were in contact with her family.

But thoughts and prayers are not enough.

Meanwhile, across town, the Mets look like champions for extending their netting and doing so proactively before something awful happened.

After all, safety changes in sports almost always seem to happen only after disasters happen. It was only when a 13-year-old girl was killed by a flying puck at an N.H.L. game in 2002 that the league called for mandatory netting to be installed at both ends of the rink.

So now the question is what it will take for Major League Baseball to make every team do what some teams already have and extend the protective netting even more. You’d figure that a toddler getting hit in the face would be the tipping point and there were signs on Thursday that maybe it will be, with three teams — Cincinnati, Seattle, San Diego — all saying they would extend the netting now in their ballparks.

It is worth remembering in all this that, for decades, there have been harrowing incidents at baseball games in which fans were injured. In 1970, a 14-year-old boy was killed by a foul ball at Dodgers Stadium. Many years and many injuries later, a Red Sox fan in 2015 was hit with a broken bat at Fenway Park and suffered serious injuries.

Following the Fenway incident, Manfred stated that the sport’s “first and foremost concern remains the safety of our fans.’’ He also noted that the issue was complicated, since some fans want to sit close to the field.

And when Manfred subsequently made the suggestion to all 30 teams that they add some additional netting, he cited another complication — that each stadium is designed differently.