EXP23
June 26th, 2007, 12:37 AM
During our tournament game this past Saturday at Riverstar we had an incident where a bat in play was hit with a thrown ball. Simple enough. The problem arose when it came to the umpire not making a call.
If I remember correctly there were runners on second and third with 2 outs. The batter hits the ball to left field, the runner that was on third picked up the bat and when heading towards the dugout must have tossed it against the fence with about 3 other bats. The runner on second came around and the throw from left was offline and hit A bat, so I retrieved it and ran back to tag the runner out but was too late. I told the ump it hit a bat and he did nothing. I asked him if he saw it hit the bat and he said, "yeah." He told me it didn't matter. I asked him to check the ruling and he went into the pro shop and returned with the same verdict but said it hit the bat the batter was using. I am not sure which bat he used since I was watching the thow come in, as was the umpire but I guess he has a photogenic memory lmao. We went into the pro shop and talked to the park manager and he explained since it was the bat used by the batter it was part of the field. I thought this only mattered if the bat was hit where the batter or on deck batter dropped it.
The umpire handled the situation very professionally and tried to call someone from U-trip headquarters between innings because he too was caught off guard by this. He did a hell of a job the rest of the game so I am in no way bashing him.
Anyone got any idea how this should have been ruled? I have gotten about a 50/50 split when asking other umpires. It will probably never happen again in a game I am involved in but I pride myself on knowing the rulebook inside and out but in my book this page must have been missing. It had little to no impact on the outcome and I am not saying the umpire was incorrect, just curious since in all the years of playing baseball, softball, and umpiring knothole I have never seen this happen.
If I remember correctly there were runners on second and third with 2 outs. The batter hits the ball to left field, the runner that was on third picked up the bat and when heading towards the dugout must have tossed it against the fence with about 3 other bats. The runner on second came around and the throw from left was offline and hit A bat, so I retrieved it and ran back to tag the runner out but was too late. I told the ump it hit a bat and he did nothing. I asked him if he saw it hit the bat and he said, "yeah." He told me it didn't matter. I asked him to check the ruling and he went into the pro shop and returned with the same verdict but said it hit the bat the batter was using. I am not sure which bat he used since I was watching the thow come in, as was the umpire but I guess he has a photogenic memory lmao. We went into the pro shop and talked to the park manager and he explained since it was the bat used by the batter it was part of the field. I thought this only mattered if the bat was hit where the batter or on deck batter dropped it.
The umpire handled the situation very professionally and tried to call someone from U-trip headquarters between innings because he too was caught off guard by this. He did a hell of a job the rest of the game so I am in no way bashing him.
Anyone got any idea how this should have been ruled? I have gotten about a 50/50 split when asking other umpires. It will probably never happen again in a game I am involved in but I pride myself on knowing the rulebook inside and out but in my book this page must have been missing. It had little to no impact on the outcome and I am not saying the umpire was incorrect, just curious since in all the years of playing baseball, softball, and umpiring knothole I have never seen this happen.