The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated Read online

  Copyright © 2006, 2020 by David Nemec

  First Sports Publishing edition 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sports Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Tom Lau

  Cover photo credit: iStockphoto

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68358-323-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68358-324-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Marilyn, whose book on rules is far more irreverent than mine

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introdution

  Introduction to the 2020 Edition of The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated

  1.00: Objectives of the Game

  2.00: The Playing Field

  3.00: Equipment and Uniforms

  4.00: Game Preliminaries

  5.00: Playing the Game

  6.00: Improper Play, Illegal Action, and Misconduct

  7.00: Ending the Game

  8.00: The Umpire

  9.00: The Official Scorer

  Definitions of Terms

  Photo Attributions

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Twenty-six years have passed since the original edition of The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated first appeared in 1994. In that time several baseball historians and researchers have imparted information that has been of considerable help in preparing the 2020 edition. The author would especially like to thank his editor, Jason Katzman, and fellow baseball historians and researchers Dennis Bingham, Rich Topp, Bill Deane, Ev Cope, Frank Vaccaro, John Thorn, David Ball, Dick Thompson, Al Blumkin, Pete Palmer, Don Malcolm, Dave Zeman, David N. Johnson, Stew Thornley, Ken Samelson, Bob Tiemann, Cappy Gagnon, Richard Malatzky, and Richard Hershberger for their invaluable contributions, along with Eric Miklich and Scott Flatow for fact-checking much of the updated material with their usual expert eyes.

  Introduction

  French historian Jacques Barzun is best known to followers of our national pastime for having written: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules, and reality of the game.” Barzun’s implication, of course, is that baseball epitomizes our nation and that its rules and rites spring from American roots. Yet that is not altogether true.

  Europeans played many different types of bat-and-ball games for centuries before the earliest American colonial settlements. These informal divertissements gradually evolved into the orderly games of cricket and rounders that had circumscribed rules and games like one old cat whose rules were often made up on the spot depending on the size of the playing field and the number of players. What all these early games had in common was that they were ancestors of baseball. For our national pastime did not have the “immaculate conception,” Barzun’s epigram would lead us to imagine but rather developed by trial and error.

  The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated endeavors to track the evolution of a great many of present-day baseball’s more interesting rules and rituals. To do so, it reports on key episodes that inspired the game’s thinkers to reconfigure a portion of the rule book and, in the process, often cites examples of both the correct application and misapplication of certain rules. Many of its illustrative anecdotes come from the nineteenth century, when the rules were in an almost constant state of flux, but the baseball rule book is still far from a perfect instrument. George Will has commented: “The real powers behind the rule book are the people who balance baseball’s financial books.” His observation is dead on, and to a large degree has always been true. Throughout the last 150 years, whenever the unequal balance between hitting and pitching threatened to affect attendance—to say nothing of lucrative TV and radio contracts—major changes were made in the game’s playing code. Arguably, the most significant one in 1893 lengthened the stretch of ground between a pitcher and a batter by moving the pitching slab to its present 60-feet, 6-inch distance from home plate, but just eight years later foul-hit balls with less than two strikes for the first time counted as strikes, and in our own time it recently no longer became necessary to pitch four balls to issue an intentional walk. Some observers are of the opinion that the game could soon arrive at a crossroads so radical that either the pitching distance is again lengthened, and if not, the possibility of the strike zone being shrunk. Others, particularly pitchers, believe the ball needs to be “dejuiced” so that every delivery in the strike zone does not boast home run potential. Fans in general indirectly agree that the ball is livelier, specifying the rash of spectator injuries of late by foul balls. The probability is strong, in any event, that a future edition of this book will depart profoundly from its predecessors.

  But the rules are also continually being rewritten for other than financial or safety reasons. Each new season brings at least one occurrence that cannot be resolved by the rule book. The 1983 “Pine Tar Game” between the New York Yankees and the Kansas City Royals is a prominent example, and is discussed in this book. But there are literally hundreds of remarkable moments in the game’s history when a player or umpire found themselves in a situation that did not have a rule to govern it.

  One of the earliest came in an American Association clash in 1887 between Louisville and Brooklyn, when a Louisville baserunner, after scoring from third base on an infield error, began wrestling with the Brooklyn catcher so that a teammate could also score. At the time, rather amazingly, an umpire was left entirely to his own devices in such a predicament because there was as yet no rule addressing a situation in which a player who had scored, and was therefore by definition no longer a baserunner, interfered with a fielder. Nevertheless, the arbiter that day, one Wesley Curry, worked out what seemed to him a logical solution, and in the process set a precedent that eventually triggered a new rule.

  Curry’s handling of the situation will be found in the section on the rules pertaining to umpires, but unfortunately not all of the fascinating incidents that led to rule changes can be tackled in a single book. In the years ahead, as interest in the game’s continuous evolution continues to spread rapidly—from scholars to baseball buffs—there will doubtless be many more efforts to help us draw a better bead on the whys and wherefores of baseball’s rules. Meanwhile, this author hopes you have as much fun with this book as he did putting it together.

  Introduction to the 2020 Edition of

  The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated

  For a number of years after the original version of this book appeared in 1994, the lone revision in the playing rules occurred in 1995, when the lower level of the strike zone became a line at the hollow beneath the batter’s kneecap rather than a line at the top of his knees. However, in the past decade alone, not only have we had a welter of new rules appear (pertaining to runner interference, home plate collisions, pitching changes, and other less momentous on-field eve
nts) but the entire rule book has also been reorganized to a degree that makes its antecedents hopelessly outdated, as the game itself has changed significantly.

  As early as the mid-1990s, largely due to the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), the complexion of baseball irretrievably transformed—particularly those features of it that required fans to trust in the legitimacy of statistical achievements produced by marquee players. Too, there began to be incidents almost every season where video replay demonstrated that umpires’ decisions were often enough mistaken in crucial situations that baseball had to follow the lead of other major sports and introduce video replay to overturn decisions that were clearly faulty. Moreover, team officials, players, and managers alike have increasingly come to rely on analytics and Statcast metrics like WAR, launch angle, and average exit velocity rather than traditional statistics such as batting average, fielding average, and ERA to measure a player’s worth. Some of these metrics are so arcane that they are nearly unintelligible to the average fan. Others seem designed only to promote the invention of new and even more attenuated metrics.

  But all this leads to the observation that the game has evolved into an unparelleled pursuit of power, whether it be at the plate or on the mound. It is now conceivable that a batter will face a different pitcher in every plate appearance in the course of a game, with each one not only fresher but throwing harder than his forerunner. It is also now the norm that practically every batter will be swinging to hit a game-winning home run in the late innings of a tie game, no matter who the pitcher is or what the defensive alignment he faces. In 2018, for the first time in major-league history, there were more strikeouts than base hits (and it occurred again in 2019). Yet, on the positive side, the 2018 season also brought the longest extra-inning game in World Series history, the first player since Babe Ruth to pitch more than 50 innings and hit more than 20 home runs in the same season (Shohei Ohtani), and a starting pitcher—Jacob deGrom of the New York Mets—that deservedly bagged the National League Cy Young Award despite winning only 10 games. On another front, contrarily innovative of late in their surrepitiously successful approach to the game have been the Tampa Bay Rays, so reliant on their bullpen that they arrived at the All-Star break in 2019 without having produced a complete game from their pitching staff since 2016, and in Ryne Stanek featured the first hurler ever to start as many as 25 games in a season while logging fewer than 50 innings pitched. In all, the Rays used 33 different pitchers in 2019 while squirming their way to an LDS appearance. Equally innovative are the Houston Astros who totally abandoned issuing intentional walks in 2019 because batters are hitting fewer ground balls, which create the double plays that intentional walks are meant to induce. Rather, batters are launching home runs at a record rate (6,671 in 2019, 671 more than the previous MLB mark of 6,105 set in 2017) turning the intentional walk into an invitation to surrender even more runs via the long ball. After hitting a record 260 homers as a team in 2018, the New York Yankees tacked on 36 more dingers in 2019 but nonetheless lost their team record when the Minnesota Twins outhomered them, 307 to 306.

  This completely updated and expanded edition of The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated explores many such far-reaching developments in the game’s never-ending evolution, including some, like umpire Joe West’s contentious ruling on Jose Altuve’s drive that landed in the right-field stands in Game Three of the 2018 ALCS, which demonstrated that all the technological advances in the world cannot completely eliminate the human element in the decision-making process. In addition, earlier controversial moments in the game’s long and rich history, such as the Merkle incident in 1908, the notorious “Pine Tar” game, and the bizarre circumstances surrounding the first batter not to be credited with the run that scored on his own home run are examined in greater depth as new information has emerged. With its new layout, altered rules, and many added anecdotes, The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated is a book no baseball lover should be without.

  1.00: Objectives of the Game

  1.06

  The winner of the game shall be that team which shall have scored, in accordance with these rules, the greater number of runs at the conclusion of a regular game.

  Seemingly, it would be safe to presume that the winner of a baseball game has always been the team that scored the most runs at the end of nine innings. However, the 1857 season (which introduced many critical changes to the playing rules), was the first time in which a game was required to go nine innings, with five full innings constituting an official contest, if play were halted for whatever reason. Prior to 1857, the objective was to score 21 runs (or aces). A game thus could end after a single inning or finish without a winner if neither team was able to tally 21 aces before darkness came. Why the teams that gathered at the landmark 1857 convention to solidify the rules of the game changed its length to nine innings rather than seven or eight—or even 10—is unknown. As good an explanation as any may be that many vital features of the game and its beloved statistics and milestones exist in threes or multiples of three: three strikes, three outs, nine men on a team, 300 wins, 3,000 hits, and .300 hitters. So why not nine innings unless, of course, the score was tied after the ninth frame, in which event, additional innings needed to be played to determine a winner. This has always been the case in tie games except in three seasons—1869, 1870, and 1871—when, if both team captains agreed after the ninth inning, the game was considered a draw. The most famous instance in which captains did not agree came on June 14, 1870, when the Brooklyn Atlantics snapped the fabled Cincinnati Red Stockings’ all-time record winning streak of 81 games in 11 innings by a score of 8–7 after Cincinnati captain Harry Wright obstinately refused Atlantics captain Bob Ferguson’s offer of a 7–7 draw at the completion of nine full innings.

  The first game played by the Cartwright rules—devised to an unknown degree by Alexander Cartwright, who is widely recognized for having merged the best features of several bat-and-ball games of his time to create the game we know as baseball—took place at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 19, 1846, between the New York Nine and Cartwright’s club, the New York Knickerbockers. The contest lasted only four innings as the Nine tallied their 21st run in the top of the fourth, added two more scores for safe measure, and then blanked the Knicks in their last turn at bat to prevail, 23–1.

  Note that even though he is still considered by many historians to have been instrumental in drawing up the first set of playing rules—with the aid of club president Duncan Curry and others—it has long been is a matter of hot debate whether Cartwright is deservingly regarded as the true “father” of baseball. Much stronger cases can now be mounted for several other baseball pioneers active in the mid-1800s, most prominently Daniel “Doc” Adams who, unlike Cartwright, was also a skillful player and organizer. In addition, Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn, convincingly posits that the Gothams—not the Knickerbockers—were in truth the first organized baseball club. Supporting Thorn is an 1887 interview with William Rufus Wheaton in the San Francisco Daily Examiner indicating that Wheaton’s team, the Gothams, had a set of written rules as early as 1837 and Wheaton laid claim to writing at least some of them. However, since Adams may be an unknown figure to many readers and fewer still will have heard of Curry and Wheaton, this author will streamline the controversy by referring throughout this book to the original set of written rules as the Cartwright rules with the understanding that Cartwright didn’t singlehandedly do all the baseball activities he’s credited with and perhaps never even participated at all in some of them. Cartwright, in other words, is simply the most well-known representative at the moment of the rules creation groundwork that may have been done in greater part by others.

  2.00: The Playing Field

  2.01 Layout of the Field

  The infield shall be a 90-foot square . . . The distance from home base to the nearest fence, stand or other obstruction on fair territory shall be 250 feet or more. A distance of 320 f
eet or more along the foul lines, and 400 feet or more to center field is preferable. The infield shall be graded so that the base lines and home plate are level. The pitcher’s plate shall be 10 inches above the level of home plate. The degree of slope from a point 6 inches in front of the pitcher’s plate to a point 6 feet toward home plate shall be 1 inch to 1 foot, and such degree of slope shall be uniform. The infield and outfield, including the boundary lines, are fair territory and all other area is foul territory . . .

  At first appearance, all the rules pertaining to the shape and size of the playing field have changed appreciably since Cartwright’s day, except for one: The bases are still 90 feet apart. Nothing was actually said about the distance between bases in the first formal code of playing rules that Cartwright drafted in 1845; the sole stipulation was that the stretch of ground from home to second base and from first to third base should be the same 42 paces. Since a pace for an athletic man walking briskly is roughly a yard, that worked out to be about 126 feet, or only a foot and a third short of the present distance between home and second base.

  Historian Frederick Ivor-Campbell speculated that Cartwright chose paces for the sake of simplicity. An empty stretch of ground can be converted into a ball diamond in a few seconds if the distances between home and second and between first and third are stepped off, whereas using a yardstick or a tape measure takes considerably longer. Ivor-Campbell also theorized that Cartwright might have preferred 42 paces to 42 yards because it produced bases for players at a distance fit for their legs. As a result, children or women pacing out a diamond will naturally come up with shorter basepaths than adult men, resulting in a game more closely suited to their physical dimensions.

  No one really knows the thinking of the game’s early designers—the bases could as easily have been 80 or 100 feet apart and still would have allowed the playing field to retain its diamond shape—but sportswriter Red Smith once said, “Ninety feet between bases is the nearest to perfection that man has yet achieved.” In addition, others have pointed out that while every other significant feature of the geometry of the playing field has changed since Cartwright’s day, the 90-foot distance has remained a constant. In truth, however, the distances today between bases are less than 90 feet. The way the bases are situated now, the distance from the edge of home plate to the edge of first base is about 88 feet; from first to second and second to third, 88½ feet; and from third to home, 88 feet. Prior to 1900, when the shape of the plate changed, the distances were different still, depending on alterations in the size and positioning of bases.