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I now understand baseball
Feb. 26th, 2008 08:26 pmIn baseball, when a runner is on base and the batter hits a fly ball that is caught by a fielder, the runner (if he has not already gotten to home plate) must tag up, which is to say, return to his time-of-pitch base before advancing.
Do you know when I learned that? Today, on Wikipedia, while pondering Jake's book of baseball puzzlers.
This is obviously a really basic rule of baseball, and it's one that I never quite understood and that always bothered me. I just knew that there was something extremely fundamental I didn't get about the conditions under which a runner had to return to his time-of-pitch base. This has vaguely disturbed me for pretty much all my life. I was too embarrassed to quiz somebody in sufficient detail to figure it out, or if I did, they probably used terminology I didn't understand. I'm not sure why I couldn't deduce it from observation, but I can offer some possibilities.
1. I really don't have much childhood experience watching baseball, nor did my parents tell me the rules. My father is an American football fan who has always found baseball tedious (though, really, American football if anything has longer periods when nothing is happening). Also, Washington, DC in the seventies and eighties wasn't a baseball town. So I grew up with at least a rudimentary understanding of pro football, but little or none of pro baseball. More recently, I've been to a few Sox games at Fenway but it can actually be harder to understand the game in person.
2. I really don't have much experience playing baseball and its derivatives either. I didn't have a lot of inherent interest in sports. As a little kid, I played T-ball, a chaotic little kids' diversion in which there are helpful dads at every base telling you which way to run, so knowing rules isn't a priority. I wasn't into sandlot games.
3. In PE class in junior high and high school, we played softball frequently, but the rules were certainly never explained to us; it was assumed we already knew how to play. (A lot of PE class was like that.) I learned to stay way out in right field and out of everyone's way, and, at bat, to strike out or hit my easy pop fly with equanimity. When I did get on base and the batter hit a caught fly ball (which must have happened at some point), I probably just cheerfully neglected this rule, got yelled at incomprehensibly and didn't spend much time thinking about why. I got yelled at frequently and sometimes punched in the gut for my inability to catch or adequately throw a ball, so one more chewing out wasn't much to worry about.
4. The rule itself is kind of hard to deduce from observation, because it has exceptional edge cases that are common in practice. Obviously it doesn't apply to the batter, and it also doesn't negate the ability to score on a sacrifice fly.
5. Finally, I think I was too thick to realize that for base advancement there would be a difference between a fly ball and a ground ball, though that distinction is obviously present elsewhere in the game. This may be because of excess mental influence from the Atari 2600 Baseball cartridge. Behavior indicates two-dimensional thinking.
Anyway, one of the puzzlers from the book Jake has mentioned the infield fly rule. I'd always heard that was legendarily confusing, and hoped that maybe it had something to do with the Basic Thing I Didn't Understand, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Well, the infield fly rule is not actually all that confusing, it's just a slightly fiddly exception with a couple of preconditions. But you can't understand the rationale for it without knowing about tagging up on a fly ball, so... I finally learned the Basic Thing!
Obviously, in hindsight the tagging-up rule makes perfect sense; it keeps baseball from being even more of a mere slugging contest than it is--the runners can't all just advance while the ball is in the air.
Do you know when I learned that? Today, on Wikipedia, while pondering Jake's book of baseball puzzlers.
This is obviously a really basic rule of baseball, and it's one that I never quite understood and that always bothered me. I just knew that there was something extremely fundamental I didn't get about the conditions under which a runner had to return to his time-of-pitch base. This has vaguely disturbed me for pretty much all my life. I was too embarrassed to quiz somebody in sufficient detail to figure it out, or if I did, they probably used terminology I didn't understand. I'm not sure why I couldn't deduce it from observation, but I can offer some possibilities.
1. I really don't have much childhood experience watching baseball, nor did my parents tell me the rules. My father is an American football fan who has always found baseball tedious (though, really, American football if anything has longer periods when nothing is happening). Also, Washington, DC in the seventies and eighties wasn't a baseball town. So I grew up with at least a rudimentary understanding of pro football, but little or none of pro baseball. More recently, I've been to a few Sox games at Fenway but it can actually be harder to understand the game in person.
2. I really don't have much experience playing baseball and its derivatives either. I didn't have a lot of inherent interest in sports. As a little kid, I played T-ball, a chaotic little kids' diversion in which there are helpful dads at every base telling you which way to run, so knowing rules isn't a priority. I wasn't into sandlot games.
3. In PE class in junior high and high school, we played softball frequently, but the rules were certainly never explained to us; it was assumed we already knew how to play. (A lot of PE class was like that.) I learned to stay way out in right field and out of everyone's way, and, at bat, to strike out or hit my easy pop fly with equanimity. When I did get on base and the batter hit a caught fly ball (which must have happened at some point), I probably just cheerfully neglected this rule, got yelled at incomprehensibly and didn't spend much time thinking about why. I got yelled at frequently and sometimes punched in the gut for my inability to catch or adequately throw a ball, so one more chewing out wasn't much to worry about.
4. The rule itself is kind of hard to deduce from observation, because it has exceptional edge cases that are common in practice. Obviously it doesn't apply to the batter, and it also doesn't negate the ability to score on a sacrifice fly.
5. Finally, I think I was too thick to realize that for base advancement there would be a difference between a fly ball and a ground ball, though that distinction is obviously present elsewhere in the game. This may be because of excess mental influence from the Atari 2600 Baseball cartridge. Behavior indicates two-dimensional thinking.
Anyway, one of the puzzlers from the book Jake has mentioned the infield fly rule. I'd always heard that was legendarily confusing, and hoped that maybe it had something to do with the Basic Thing I Didn't Understand, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
Well, the infield fly rule is not actually all that confusing, it's just a slightly fiddly exception with a couple of preconditions. But you can't understand the rationale for it without knowing about tagging up on a fly ball, so... I finally learned the Basic Thing!
Obviously, in hindsight the tagging-up rule makes perfect sense; it keeps baseball from being even more of a mere slugging contest than it is--the runners can't all just advance while the ball is in the air.