From ESPN.com today we bring you a story that asks the question, “How well do we know baseball’s rules?”
One of the objections I hear most from my friends who are not sports fans is that the rules of sports seem to be completely arbitrary and incredibly fickle. Why so many whistles, they wonder? How can one not particularly violent act be a penalty while a figurative mugging goes unpunished? There are two sides to responding to this sentiment and we try to represent both of them on this site: the rules will seem less arbitrary the more you know about them; and of course they are arbitrary — let’s have some fun about it!
On the educational side, we’ve had posts explaining some basic concepts like What is a Down in Football, What is Being Offside in a number of sports, What Does it Mean to Have a Foul to Give, and How Do the Shooting Space and Checking Rules Work in Girls Lacrosse? We even addressed the issue directly when asked “Are Basketball Fouls Really Arbitrary? We’ve also had some fun with the issue. In the post about Girls Lacrosse we reminded you that:
even professional athletes are sometimes confused about the rules, like Donovan McNabb, a quarterback in the NFL who famously did not try very hard at the end of overtime because he thought that if the game was tied at the end of one overtime, they would just play another instead of the game ending in a tie… which it does.
This is exactly the conclusion the ESPN.com piece comes to: “We had 20 of the most astute players in the game take the quiz. Their average score: 5.5 out of 10.” The author Jayson Stark has some fun with the subject and collects a few gems about the rules of baseball:
Sam Fuld has to be one of the brightest human beings in baseball. He got better than 1400 on his SAT. He understands stuff like matrix methodology. But even he has a hard time understanding the rationale behind the rules of baseball. And can you blame him?
“Most of these rules are just illogical,” he said. “I tried to base my answers on logic and reason. … But baseball and logic don’t mix very well, in many respects.”
If you’d like to take the test yourself, here’s the link, post your results in the comments section!
I took the quiz the other day, and did very poorly. Even if the average score on this quiz is low, I doubt that most fans would be shocked by any of the rulings, since the occurrence of these scenarios is relatively low. However, in the video where they interview Buck Showalter about how well the players know the rules, he blew my mind when he struck down the well know rule of thumb that the “tie goes to the runner.” That led me to this: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/inside-the-rules-tie-goes-to-the-runner/ Apparently this is a rules issue that not even umpires agree on. Theoretically, there aren’t ties. But in reality, the plays are often so close that it is impossible for the umpire to see the play with that level of precision. The rules do not mention ties. You could read the rules as “ties do not exist,” or “tie goes to the runner” because the runner is not out before he is on the base, or “a tie is an out” because the runner does not beat the ball.
Hmmm. Interesting. I got a seven on the quiz but I think that is because I know so little about baseball that I didn’t fall into any of the traps set. I like the question of how you write impossible things into the rulebook.