quote:
Originally posted by JMoff:
Yeah, went from memory again.
The rule about wild pitches and passed balls is one I don't quite get. I believe FED says if it bounces BEFORE the plate it should be a wild pitch but bounces AFTER the plate it should be a passed ball.
I don't really score them this way but I believe that is the letter of the law.
I use the OBR definition of ordinary effort, at the level of play. T-ball is different than HS, which is different from MLB or College.
No problem. I suffer from the mad cow myself,
The difference in the WP is that 9-6-1 says any pitch that touches the ground in FRONT of the plate is a WP, of course among other things.
Here’s what OBR says in 10.13(a).
The official scorer shall charge a pitcher with a wild pitch when a legally delivered ball touches the ground or home plate before reaching the catcher and is not handled by the catcher, thereby permitting a runner or runners to advance.That give absolutely no choice to the scorer, and that makes it totally objective, assuming the scorer sees the pitch touch the ground. But in 9-6-1, since it throws ordinary effort in there, it gives the scorer some latitude. What I’ve found after 20+ years of scoring and talking to scorers, is that the more inexperienced the scorer is, the more likely they call just about everything a PB.
There’s 2 reasons for that. #1 they seldom know that actual verbiage of the rule because they haven’t read it, and #2 PBs help ERAs. It helps either pitcher, but very seldom do scorers care about the other team’s pitchers. And if they only look at the NFHS book, that will tend to support the ones who think a catcher should stop everything right at him, and thus it helps their pitchers.
But MLB who had far superior pitchers and catchers says a ball in the dirt is essentially a rotten throw. That’s something clearly consistent with other rules about errors. Here’s an excerpt from 10.12(a).
If a throw is low, wide or high, or strikes the ground, and a runner reaches base who otherwise would have been put out by such throw, the official scorer shall charge the player making the throw with an error. Again, the scorer has no choice. A throw that touches the dirt and then isn’t handled, is an error on the thrower, and its no different for a pitch. The pitcher is charged with a rotten throw, but he’s not charged with an error. That was done to keep pitchers from making rotten throws on purpose to keep their ERA’s down to get a better contract.
As a scorer, I choose to use the OBR directives because the HS ones are more strict for players with far less experience, and I fund that absurd.
You use the OBR definition of ordinary effort because you’ve read and understand it. I remember when I got a copy of the letter MLB sent to all scorers that had the new definition in it. The 1st thing I did was send the MLB rules committee a big thank you, and found out that they had gotten more positive comments on that minor addition to the rules than any rule change in history.
It could still be a tad better, but scorekeepers have been arguing about what ordinary effort meant for decades! Since youth rulebooks still don’t have it as far as I know, unless a HS or college scorer has read OBR, they’d be doing what we all did before the definition. They be guessing what it meant, and those guess would vary wildly for scorer to scorer. The definition has done a lot to make scoring a lot more consistent, at least for those choosing to use it.
