tommy.ventre: The way Fed’s rule is written makes it seem like contact with the catcher on a follow-through is ALWAYS an immediate dead ball. But what about this situation:
The pitch was never caught by the catcher (wild pitch/passed ball). To be clear, this no-catch is NOT a result of the follow-through contact — just an uncatchable pitch. Runner advances on the passed ball, NOT on a steal attempt. If the catcher wasn’t making a play on the runner, then by rule there is no interference, right? So do we still kill the ball? Do we still send the runner back?
Maybe the key question here is when does the ball become dead. Fed says immediate dead ball if there is interference. But again, in this passed-ball/wild-pitch situation, there is no play being made on the runner, so is there really any interference? Can’t we keep the ball live? Can’t the runner still advance?
As far as I know, the runner can advance in this situation.
Mark Astolfi: Wow, this is a roaring hot topic! Altho I see other posts that get zero comments, so what the heck. Maybe I just wasn’t saying it right…it is tricky. The point is, consider a situation where you are only going to make up as many games as are necessary to determine playoff status. And you don’t know whether it will take one game or two. If it would take one game, you’d play 9 innings…if two games, 7 innings. For how many innings do you schedule the first game? And my answer was, since it’s possible you’d need two games, you schedule two games for 7 innings each, then cancel the second game if it’s not necessary. Trouble with that reasoning is, the losing team could argue that since you only played one game, it should have gone on for two more innings, during which time of course they might have won.
I also see a lot of posts here not getting a response. Probably everyone has gone to some other forum.
