By Scott:
As an official scorer, I’ll transcribe the result of 75 or so plate appearances by batters in a typical game. Most require no judgment from me. In fact, there are days on which my job is solely an exercise in accurate record-keeping rather than one that requires me to be the arbitrator of baseball justice.
A few times a season, I’ll be presented with a very tough judgment call. I wrote about one such play in my last post on this site. Those situations are where I “earn my paycheck,” so to speak, since whatever decision I make is going to draw frustration and/or anger from one clubhouse.
There are 10 sections to the Official Baseball Rules, which cover 117 pages (as a PDF download from MLB.com). The first nine sections refer to specifically to how the game is played, from the definition of terms to the dimensions of the field to the ways outs are made and runs are scored. The 10th section is the largest (33 pages) and deals solely with the official scorer.
Section 10 is where I get all my instructions, and there are a lot. The section takes most decisions out of my hands. For example, rule 10.13(a) states that if a runner advances on a pitch that hits the ground before it reaches the catcher, I must call it a wild pitch even if I feel that the catcher could have reasonably handled the ball and kept the runner at his previous base. I have no latitude to exercise judgment on this play and place blame on the catcher by ruling a passed ball.
Where I can use judgment is when determining when a play is a hit or an error. All of my judgments are centered on the term “ordinary effort.” If a fielder fails to make a play that, in my opinion, could have been made with ordinary effort, the fielder is charged with an error. If the same fielder fails to make a play, but I determine that it would have required something beyond ordinary effort to make the play, the batter gets a hit.
Here’s the rulebook definition of ordinary effort (from section 2.00):
ORDINARY EFFORT is the effort that a fielder of average skill at a position in that league or classification of leagues should exhibit on a play, with due consideration given to the condition of the field and weather conditions.
That’s all I have to go on, and while most plays that require weighing these guidelines are somewhat clear because of the familiarity you develop from watching thousands of games over the years, occasionally something happens for which you’re completely unprepared (and for which the rule book is absolutely no help).
One such bizarre play happened a couple of years ago while I was scoring a Salem-Keizer Volcanoes game.
A Volcanoes hitter crushed a ball directly at the opposing third baseman, and it took 2 or 3 hops before nailing the fielder in his right forearm. He knocked the ball down (which is the most he could reasonably be expected to with such little time to react), and because it was hit so hard had more than ample time to pick it up and throw to first for the out.
Unfortunately for the third baseman, his throw was a mess. It sailed about 10 feet wide of first base and the batter reached safely. A good throw would’ve put the runner out by about 25 feet, so I ruled an error and didn’t think much of it. In my mind, because the ball was hit straight at the third baseman, he had exerted ordinary effort in knocking it down, picking it up and throwing to first. Since he failed to get the out, it was an error.
After the game, I was approached by the Volcanoes’ third base coach, who asked me to reconsider my call because the third baseman told him after the play that the ball had hit his arm so hard that it went numb and he actually couldn’t feel anything as he threw to first. As the coach saw it, how could I hold the third baseman responsible for a throw if he couldn’t feel his arm when he made it?
This was a great question, and one for which the rules provide no guidance whatsoever. The coach’s viewpoint was completely reasonable, and he was doing his job by trying to coax me into giving his player a hit. Initially, I was going to go along with him and change the call. I even saw the third baseman after the game with is arm in a makeshift sling, lending credence to the idea that the guy was indeed injured on the play.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt I needed to stick to my initial call. Here’s my reasoning:
1) I honestly believe that the fielder was injured on the play, and even buy that he couldn’t feel his arm when he threw to first. However, he did not receive any medical attention on the field and played the rest of the game (this play happened in the 3rd or 4th inning). In my mind, since the player did not leave the game after the play in question, as an official scorer I have to assume that he is a healthy player. I certainly wasn’t going to give him a free pass if he made more bad throws the rest of the game (he didn’t).
2) The rules of baseball aren’t always logical (we’ll talk about sacrifice flies sometime), but the general goal of section 10 is to limit an official scorer’s judgment to only those instances when it’s necessary. As I see it, it’s not my job to decide if a player is hurt at any given time. From a scoring perspective, I feel that a player in the game is considered healthy and is only “injured” if he leaves the game.
3) Mostly, I feel this is a “slippery slope” scenario. If I excuse this guy’s bad throw because I trust his story that he couldn’t feel his arm, where is the line drawn? For me, the line is whether or not the player is immediately removed from the game. In that case, I probably would have changed my mind and given a hit to the batter.
This led to an outcome that was entirely unfair to both the batter and the fielder. The batter hit the ball really hard, but got unlucky that it was directly at a fielder who was then temporarily incapacitated. The fielder tried his best to throw to first but couldn’t control where it went because he lost feeling in his arm.
Like life, baseball ain’t fair. To this day, I feel that I made the “correct” ruling in the spirit of the rules of the game, but still feel bad that neither guy got a favorable result in the box score when they each probably deserved better.