The Devil in the Details

10 years ago, I made an argument about baseball rules that almost shut down a Little League final. This year, I finally decided to figure out whether I'd been right.

It was a perfect day for baseball. A warm sun was shining; a cool breeze blew; the big, happy crowd cheered; an ice cream truck sat on the street next to the field keeping the kids cool and happy. It was a June Saturday in 2011, and at Seton Park, at the intersection of 232nd Street and Independence Avenue in the Bronx, the Seniors division of South Riverdale Little League was playing its championship. 

To understand the dynamics of SRLL, you have to know the stories of the two teams involved. One team, the Dodgers, was Goliath personified. The coach, a truly icky guy, assembled the same group of stars every year, even though that wasn’t supposed to be anywhere close to allowed. Each season inevitably ended with his team in the finals; most years, they won. The other team, the Diamondbacks, sponsored by the local jeweler — not to be confused with the Animals (sponsored by the vet), the Slicers (sponsored by the pizzeria), or the heroes (sponsored by the deli) — was David: the gritty band of upstarts assembled by two determined coaches in the latest bid to unseat the perennial champions. A few years before, my father had made the same attempt; that team had gone to the finals against the Dodgers, but lost 2-0 despite my 11-strikeout complete game, because we’d been shut down on offense by a 12-year-old pitcher who was about 6’4’’ throwing what had to be 65 miles per hour from 46 feet.

A few years later in the seniors championship, though, the Diamondbacks had the Dodgers on the ropes. It was the top of the tenth inning of a game that should have gone seven; the score was tied 2-2. The Diamondbacks had the go-ahead run on second with one out. As the crowd watched breathlessly, the Diamondback batter drove a ball deep into the left-field gap. The runner on second took off. He took his turn, touched third, and sprinted home. He scored without a throw, and just like that, the Diamondbacks were three outs away from ending the Dodgers’ season.

Out came the coach, icky as always, to make a pitching change. A new pitcher came in and warmed up, while the Diamondbacks’ half of the crowd continued celebrating. And then, before anyone realized what was happening, the new pitcher stepped off the rubber and threw to third to make an appeal play, and the home-plate umpire called the runner out for missing third base. The run was nullified. The game was tied again. 

I was watching the game from the third-base side, right next to the Diamondbacks’ dugout, and suddenly, I knew that this was my chance — maybe my only chance — to contribute to the noble quest of toppling the Dodgers. So I sprinted out onto the field.

“No, no, a pitching change counts as a play,” I shouted towards the home-plate umpire. “You can’t make an appeal after a pitching change.”

Have you ever seen the movie Kingsman: The Secret Service, in which the villain, Samuel L. Jackson with a lisp, turns on a secret microchip that he’s embedded in people’s phones, and immediately their rational brains stop working and the world descends into pandemonium? That’s basically what happened. Both umpires had looks on their faces that you sometimes see on students taking really difficult math tests, looks that said that as low as they’d ever thought their confidence in their own intelligence could ever go, it had just gone far lower than that. Fans on both sides were now equally confused. The game froze solid. The umpires huddled together around home plate whispering to each other; eventually, someone found a rule book, and the umpires continued huddling around home plate whispering to each other, now perusing a little league rule book for answers as if it was the back of the Declaration of Independence. The game stopped for — I’m not exaggerating — fifteen or twenty minutes. I stood with the Diamondbacks’ coaches, explaining my interpretation of the rules in an urgent whisper.

Here’s the thing: I had no idea whether my interpretation of the rules was right. I’d read in some book of baseball brainteasers that you couldn’t run an appeal play after a balk, because a balk counted as its own play. Did a pitching change count as a play? I hoped it did, and I knew that morally, if it could help beat the Dodgers, it should, but I had no earthly idea.

Finally, the umpires realized that they had no earthly idea how to interpret this particular semantic conundrum, and decided that the play would stand as called. The game remained tied. In the bottom of the tenth, the Dodgers first baseman, who must have been about 6’3’’, 250, shot a line drive down the first-base line with a runner on second, and that runner, the commissioner’s son, came around to score the run that won the championship for his team. If the Dodgers were going to be dethroned, it would have to be another year.

Eventually, the play faded from my mind. Soon the Dodgers had all aged out of the league, and a new collection of heroes and villains had taken over. Slowly but surely, my indignation disappeared. 

Still, though, every so often I would think back to the game. I would think about that appeal play, and those 20 minutes of chaos. I started thinking beyond little league: what would happen, I wondered, if the same thing happened in a major league game? Could you make an appeal play after a pitching change? I couldn’t stop wondering: had I been right or wrong?

**********

Here are the MLB rules that govern appeal plays when runners miss bases. There’s rule 5.09C(2):

Any runner shall be called out, on appeal, when: (2) With the ball in play, while advancing or returning to a base, he fails to touch each base in order before he, or a missed base, is tagged 

Then there are comments on rule 5.09C:

Any appeal under this rule must be made before the next pitch, or any play or attempted play. If the violation occurs during a play which ends a half-inning, the appeal must be made before the defensive team leaves the field. 

It’s actually pretty simple: if a defense suspects that a runner missed a base, the pitcher simply has to step off the rubber and throw to that base. But the devil, as always, is in the details. An appeal must be made before the next pitch, play, or attempted play. But what counts as an attempted play?

My first stop, of course, was the “definitions of terms” section of the rulebook. Knowing the definition of a play, obviously, will help determine what counts as a play and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the only definition of “play” in the MLB rulebook is that it’s what an umpire shouts to the pitcher when he’s ready for action to resume. There’s no definition of what “a play” is. The rulebook uses the phrase “play or attempted play” four times; there’s no definition for that either.

So...I was stuck. There’s a gray area here, it seems, that the league hasn’t explained yet. Forget the pitching change for a second. What counts as a “play or attempted play”? Obviously, a pickoff throw would count as a play — but what if the pitcher just steps off the rubber, then steps back on? What if the pitcher steps off and fakes a throw? What if the pitcher gets halfway through his motion, but the home-plate umpire calls time? What if, before the pitcher can step off the rubber to make his appeal play throw, a runner takes off for the next base? 

That, really, is at the heart of the issue. If there was an official definition of “play or attempted play,” I could simply read that and decide whether it included a pitching change. Without that definition, I had to dig a little bit deeper. 

Fortunately — or, depending how you look at it, unfortunately — the experts I asked were pretty much unanimous in their assessment: I had been wrong. 

“A legal appeal would count following the pitching change,” said Michael Teevan in the MLB communications department. “The length of the pitching change or some other delay is not a determining factor.”

Jeff Lanz, the senior director of communications for Minor League Baseball, forwarded me an explanation from Jorge Bauza, a Minor League Baseball Umpire Development Coordinator. “A pitching change DOES NOT eliminate the defense's right to appeal the missing of a base,” he wrote. “Only a pitch, play or attempted play (after a break in the action) will eliminate the right to appeal a missed base or one that has been left too soon.”

“Does the act of changing pitchers by the defense constitute a play?  I do not believe it does, nor can I find anything in writing with the casebook saying it is,” wrote Tom Kenzie, of the Elite Baseball Umpires Association. “Therefore, I would have to conclude that it doesn’t constitute a play. I shared this with a couple of college assignors whom I have known for many years, as well as a member of the Rule committee from the Westchester County Baseball Umpires Association, and they agreed with my interpretation.”

Only one interpretation tilted even slightly towards the one I’d come up with as a fourteen-year-old. Nick Gattucio, of UmpireBible.com, said that while he thought a pitching change would not constitute a play, he couldn’t be sure. 

“The simple fact that time was called, granted, the pitching change made, and then the ball put back into play, does not itself (with a strict, literal reading of the rule) appear to nullify the opportunity, since all of this does not constitute a ‘play’ (or so it appears to me), nor has there been an intervening play,” he told me. “If this were an umpire exam and I was compelled to commit to an answer, I'd say that the appeal would be allowed. That said, I would not bet the house on this answer.”

So there you have it. Taken together, the various interpretations I got from experts point to a conclusion: definitively, emphatically, I was wrong. The appeal was valid, and those icky, nasty Dodgers won the championship fair and square.

Well, not quite. Remember what I said at the beginning? 

The runner on second took off. He took his turn, touched third, and sprinted home.

Remember what else I said?

I was watching the game from the third-base side, right next to the Diamondbacks’ dugout.

That’s right. I was right there, right by third base, watching intently. And to this day, I swear, hand to god, that whether the appeal was valid or not, that runner never missed third base.