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.
I was there the night it was first enforced. Seibu pitcher Kona Takahashi was backing up home plate, and made a sweep tag on the sliding Fighters’ runner, whom the ump called out. On review, the umps said Takahashi’s toe had been on the base line. And Japan was off on a three-month journey to understand what it meant to be blocking the baseline.
MLB enforcement went through similar iterations with some umpires ruling every inch of the third-base line a no-fielder zone the instant a runner stepped on third base.
The obstruction clarification should have been unnecessary in the first place. MLB umpires had completely given up on enforcing it at home plate – despite the official rules specifying that no fielder at any base could not block the baseline without the ball – and doing so would require the runner be ruled safe.
The hang-up was the clause that allows the defensive player to be in the base path without the ball provided he had to occupy that space in order to field the ball. Everyone seemed to be fine with the catcher camping on the baseline waiting for the ball because “he was there to field the ball,” while ignoring the fact that in nearly every circumstance, he could still field the ball somewhere else without blocking the base line.
The result of ignoring this rule led to collisions at home plate becoming part of the game, and runners being allowed to jar the ball loose by any means necessary. When Buster Posey, whose injury was not the cause of the MLB rule shift, was run over while he fumbled with the ball and not even close to the plate, my colleague said of the runner, “what did you expect the runner to do, let himself be tagged out?”
My answer was, he could have tried a hook slide or something else allowed by the rules. But my friend would have none of it. Because the umpires allowed it, players were required to dismember catchers if necessary in order to score.
MLB eventually decided to update its rule, not because of Posey’s horrific injury, but because catcher Alex Avila, whose father was the Detroit Tigers’ GM, got wiped out at home plate.
The move to remove the risk of excessive and unnecessary injuries to runners and catchers because of what umpires had allowed them to do for decades despite the rules, spurred one moronic response from by Terence Moore on Nov. 18 on MLB.com. He argued that violent collisions had always been part of the game, which was historically speaking, nonsense.
Violence HAD been part of the game, after the National League absorbed its rival, the American Association in the late 19th century, and only stopped being a part of the game in response to dwindling attendance and a new major league, the AL, selling its product as “clean baseball” in an attempt to return the game’s focus to speed and skill.
The violence slowly crept back into the game and was allowed to stay because umpires and administrators dropped the ball. Moore argued that players had a way of policing opponents’ bad behavior, ostensibly through violence.
This is idiotic since people don’t pay to go to baseball games in order to see men sort out their differences. Moore’s suggestion is like telling school principals who are tasked with the students’ safety, they should not stop fights because the kids need to deliver justice in their own way.
Anyway, the rule came, and it did not usher in an apocalypse, and the baseball is better than it was.
Once Japan figured out that its rules were ambiguous, it ruled that catchers could never be in the baseline with the ball under any circumstances, and that if they were and there was a collision, then the runner would be ruled safe at home. This is still the rule on the books, but for the past three years, it seems, NPB seems to have decided to ignore it, which means it is going back up a dark alley with no way out until someone gets hurt.
