[Warren Willson]

Originally posted by DJWickham
In a post about his poor Red Socks, Jim Porter wrote:

This raises a question I've had for some time. Are protest rulings any precedent? I haven't found any place in which the protest rulings are collected, and for recent years, the MLB protest rulings are simply press releases that do not explain the reasoning.

Should we, for example, take note that the 1934 protest of Bill Klem's judgment non-call of an IF was sustained (on the otherwise erroneous ground that a fly ball that drops onto the infield is an infield fly.) The ruling reportedly caused Klem to utter what may be the most important rule interpretation of all: the rules "were written by gentlemen for gentlemen, not by lawyers for lawyers."

....for the LONG answer!

Any ruling of a Protest Committee, or a League President acting as the Protest Committee, is a ruling on that subject for the league in question. That is why in the case of the George Brett pine tar incident, for instance, there was a casebook comment added to the rule to give continuing effect to that decision for ALL professional leagues. The real question should be, for WHOM are such rulings a precedent? In the case of MLB rulings, I am sure the umpires concerned would be given at least a transcript of any contrary ruling or an interim Instruction so they won't repeat the error that produced the successful protest. It takes much longer to amend the rules themselves, however.

I strongly suspect that a number of NAPBL interpretations are, in fact, the direct result of successful protests over the initial interpretations. The ruling on a foul tip needing to be ultimately caught by the catcher is one possible case in point. One way or the other, though, the league involved provides a means for the ruling to be passed to the relevant officials. Remember, MLB's OBR doesn't exist so officials of amateur leagues can call by those rules. As Jim Porter correctly notes, the truly important precedents will find their way into a medium we can access eventually.

On the Klem decision, IF you were an MLB umpire the answer would be YES you certainly should take note of the decision. What the league was saying there is that at this level such a fly ball MUST be considered catchable with ordinary effort by players of that calibre, if it falls in the infield. That has the force of a league direction on interpreting the Infield Fly rule, but only for MLB officials. I don't have a copy of the current MLB Instructions, so I can only speculate, but this may still be the case even today. It is fair to assume that the fact this interpretation hasn't since filtered down to the NAPBL is evidence that it was always intended as a ruling ONLY for MLB. Remember, MLB is perpetually trying to maintain lock step with the expectations of the fans on most calls. I think the rest of us still have considerable judgement to exercise on this play.

Cheers,

[Edited by Warren Willson on Feb 27th, 2001 at 01:12 PM]