Jayson Stark of ESPN.com has a new column online today as well as a quiz featuring some of the obscure rules from baseball’s vast rulebook.
I invite you to take the quiz. Good luck with it. I hope you do better than I did!
MLB’s rule book is, indeed, deep. Several major league players and officials struggled with it as well.
The Summer of 2013, it seems, has been baseball’s Season of Discontent when it comes to following the rules (or even enforcing them). Just last week, the Dodgers and Diamondbacks engaged in a mega-brawl which was sparked, in part, by both teams interpretation of how the other team violated the unwritten rules of the game.
But, even the written rules of the game are sometimes hard to decipher as was evidenced by MLB’s suspension of one of its umpires last month when he didn’t know (or forgot) rules surrounding a pitching change.
Hey, anyone can make a mistake. I just flunked a quiz – BADLY – so I can’t say a thing.
Even the world of youth baseball has its own set of unwritten rules (I managed to learn the written ones without exception). Many are the same as in the big leagues but some are specific to the youth game. Here are some points of baseball etiquette I picked up during my years with FB, Inc.:
Steals, Wild Pitches and Passed Balls –
At a certain point in a blowout, we instructed our players not to advance on the basepaths unless a ball was put in play by the batter. It’s hard to pinpoint the moment at which a game become out of reach (and thus, these tenants kick in). If you were up by double digits, for example, there was no reason to try to embarrass the opponent. If your lead exceeded the ‘run rule,’ (the maximum number of runs a team could score in an inning), as well, the practice generally applied.
Pick-up Players -
One of the key rules to know is that a team had to have at least eight players present in order to play a game (even to start the game). When summer vacations kicked in, sometimes, it could be challenging to just come up with eight.
In any case, you could call around the league to see if a player from another team would be willing to play for you. There was an unwritten rule that you needed to check with his coach before asking the player to join you. There was also a second belief that you didn’t automatically try to go for that team’s best player (in other words, a ‘ringer’). A good, mid-level player was generally the accepted practice.
Not all coaches would follow this rule.
Cheering or Jeering –
It was generally accepted practice to cheer for your team. Saying something nasty or mean about someone on the other team was just not done. There was, in actuality, a Code of Conduct we all agreed to follow (and communicating positive messages were part of the Code).
We talked about The Code a great deal.
One of our rival teams on the hill in Farragut Baseball, Inc. took it further. The coaches liked to talk in lofty terms about not engaging in gamesmanship…and then they were the ones most likely to violate the unwritten rules…like the time the coach was over messing with one of our starting pitchers during his pre-game warm-ups.
Generally speaking, though, the Farragut teams always played a classy brand of the game and observed the rules – both unwritten and otherwise.
When we left the comfort of our home park and traveled to other parks, this wasn’t always the case. So we always prepared our players to expect the unexpected and to be able and ready to adapt before they ran off to take the field in another tournament.
If you can pass that quiz, of course, you’re doing very well.
JG
(Source: ESPN)
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