I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. C'mon? Don't ya know? It has to be a baseball umpire. You know that there is a shortage of umpires in the mid west. Maybe its because the ones that are willing to do it are tired of being berated when a close call goes against a team. These guys spend two or three hours on a field in all kinds of weather for a minimal amount of money and get boos and hisses when they make a call. Honestly these guys couldn't care less who wins or loses. They want to call the game to the best of their ability and keep the game moving. Being an umpire is hard. Have you ever read a baseball rule book. The MLB rule book is 184 pages long. There are only 9 rules and each of those have dozens of sub-rules. I have been around this game for almost 45 years and every time I pick up a rule book and read it I learn something new.
I can't tell you how many baseball games I have played, coached or spectated but it seems that inevitably something happens that I have never seen before. This weekend I had a situation in Elizabethtown like that and I am still scratching my head. I'll set it up for you and then feel free to comment, call or text. Here's the situation.
Nobody on and nobody out and the inning is irrelevant. Batter has two strikes and swings through a curve ball in the dirt. The batter runner takes off for first on the dropped third strike, and tosses his bat away. The bat strikes the live ball blocked by the catcher and then shoots the ball away from the catcher toward the fence. This allows the runner to safely make it to first without a throw. Let me say that the umpire called the batter runner out for impeding the play. The umpire also made it clear that the batter's bat that hit the ball did not look intentional. Here in lies the confusion. The offensive team protested that the actions of the batter and the bat (unintentional) was just bad luck for the defense and the batter runner should be safe. Of course the defensive team protested that there was some sort of interference since the batter's bat struck the ball when he routinely tossed it aside. We ruled that the batter runner was out because he impeded the play! I don't know if we got this call right?
I have talked with no less than thirteen very smart baseball guys about this situation. Seven of them have agreed that the batter runner should be called out and 6 of them said that since the bat struck the live ball on accident then its just tough luck for the defense and the batter runner should have been called safe. What do you think? Do you know the answer? If you know the answer and can clearly explain it, I'd like to know? So for all of you baseball experts out there please feel free to reply - I don't know if you can but would love to know the right call for this play. Good luck out there its a jungle of rules that we all thought we knew. Ha ha!
Coach Bale
