Once in a while, even I have to look up a rule

Thursday night I had a three-game umpiring shift at Cap Hill. All three games were blowouts and all involved teams I generally like to draw on my schedule. Nevertheless, by the time we got into the third game I wasn't in the mood to be there anymore for whatever reason. It wasn't especially cold, wasn't raining, I hadn't skipped lunch, I wasn't on short sleep, nothing like that, it was just one of those things. Might have had something to do with getting some lip from a few different players about ball/strike calls. Or it might not. I don't know.

The questioned strike calls I actually have some sympathy for because they came on pitches that I absolutely hate to face myself as a batter. Both pitchers in the third game were partial to very high arc pitches, ones that scrape 12 feet off the ground before dropping back down. I hate these. They always, always look like they're going to be high. And sometimes they drop right into the strike zone.

After doing the ump thing for several years, I've gotten better at ignoring the high arc when calling the pitch. It's hard, though. You've got to focus as much as your attention as you can on watching just the strike zone and see if the ball crosses it or not, but you can't totally ignore what happens before that because an arc can be too high (or too low) to be legal and you've got to call that too.

As a batter I've gotten a number of strikes called on me from such pitches that I (internally) groused about, but mostly because I just hate them. I mean, yeah, in my playing league we sometimes get Seattle Parks & Rec's answer to C.B. Bucknor as our umpire and I'm less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt, but when I'm grousing it's not about the call so much as the super-high-arc pitch being legal. But it is, so you live with it.

Anyway, I called two batters out on strikes on such pitches. One, someone I see a lot of in this league, was cool about it even though she disagreed. We had a nice conversation about it when she came back out to catch the next inning and agreed that high-arc pitches suck. The other one was not cool about it and tried to start an argument. "How can that be a strike?!" I stopped short of being snarky and replying with, "well, you see, there's this thing called the 'strike zone,' and when the pitch crosses it..." and instead just said, in what I hope was a subdued manner, "really?" And she was ready to get into it until her teammates corralled her back to the dugout. (It's usually dudes that get in my face if anyone does, but hey, feminism.)

But those weren't the odd thing about that shift. The oddity came when, in a bases-loaded, two-out situation, the runner going from first to second base was hit by a batted ball; weird in and of itself because it was a high bouncer that took a few seconds to reach the basepaths, but she was still hit in the foot. By the time she was, though, the runner from third had already scored with time to spare. So, the runner is out for being hit, it's the third out so the inning is over, but does the run count? I did not know and just decided on the spot that it would. (It was a blowout, the run wasn't going to matter, and I had to decide, so...) But should it have?

I had to look it up later. And what I found in the rules was not helpful. Rule 5.09(b)(7): A runner is out when "touched by a fair [batted] ball in fair territory before the ball has gone by an infielder (other than the pitcher) and no other infielder has a chance to make a play on the ball. The ball is dead and no runner may score, nor runners advance, except runners forced to advance." (Italics mine)

The bases were loaded, so on a bouncer all runners were forced to try to advance. However, the runner from first was the one out when hit by the batted ball. In other circumstances, that runner being out (the third out) before reaching second base negates anything accomplished by other runners, but in runner-hit-by-fair-ball cases the batter is awarded a base hit rather than reaching on a fielder's choice, meaning s/he didn't hit into a force play. How does that come into play, if at all? Also, the rule says no runners may score except those forced to advance, and if we're using the any-other-circumstances force theory then in any case of a runner being hit by a batted ball there could never be a runner forced to advance. So why would the rule include that exception? Is it a convoluted way to say, well, if there are runners at first and second and the runner from second is hit by the batted ball, then obviously the runner from first gets second base because the batter gets a base hit and you can't have two runners at first? I guess that technically tracks, but it still isn't clear to me that "forced to advance" doesn't refer to where runners are at the start of the play, and the fact that the batter is not recorded as hitting into any kind of forceout but credited with a hit further screws it up.

If it happens again, I think I will rule differently—that such a run does not count and if not the third out then the runner must go back to third base (and runner going from second to third back to second) because the force would have been removed when the runner from first was declared out and therefore the runner from third isn't forced to advance.

But I still don't know if that's right or not.

Then there was something in tonight's game between Your Seattle Mariners and the Los Angeles Angels of Orange County Which Isn't Technically Los Angeles. Angel right fielder Jo Adell—who had already, by the way, robbed the M's of two homers—leaped into the right field seats to catch a fly ball that would otherwise be a home run. Adell went over the fence, tumbling into the first few rows of seats but did catch the ball. Still, he's off the field by that time. Is it a catch? I knew that it would be once Adell returned to the field never having lost or surrendered control of the ball, but since he took his sweet time doing so, and since there was a second or two that he was out of view of all cameras, it was questionable enough that the Mariners challenged the ruling of fair catch. In a search of the rules I didn't find any mention of catches by a fielder leaving the playing field other than as pertains to the dugouts, but I know from past occurrences that a fielder that makes a catch while one or both feet are on or directly above the field of play and falls into the seating area or a bullpen or whatnot has to maintain control of the ball and return to the field before the out is official, and since Adell stood there reveling in his catch for a bit before jumping back into right field it was a little murky. Or maybe the M's challenged on the chance that Adell only caught the ball after his whole body was past the field boundary?

In any case, the catch was ruled legal and thus Adell had accomplished the rare feat of catching three would-be home runs in one game. Incredible.