On Sunday, the Hawks-Marines game ended in a tie after a ninth-inning play in which a run scored at the plate after the catcher’s tag was applied because the ball inadvertently came out of the catcher’s glove, but had this been six or seven years ago, it might not have mattered because of Japan’s difficult experience with enforcing and not enforcing the obstruction rule at home plate.

In Japan, catchers once didn’t even need to tag the runner. Until 2015, they could block the plate entirely without the ball, catch it and curl up around it. When the runner touched the catcher’s body, the balled-up catcher might roll a few meters from the play, produce the ball, and the ump would call the runner out – even if the ball arrived after the runner and the catcher made no attempt to apply a tag.

Once NPB adopted an MLB-style collision rule in 2016, a fielder with the ball in hand was not allowed to breath on the base line if a runner on third even thought about coming home, because the ump would call him safe and even signal him to leave third base and proceed to the plate–on review of course–since virtually no umpire in the history of Japanese pro baseball has ever ruled a runner safe for obstruction.