Quote:
Originally posted by Jim Mills
Apparently, OBR considers the catcher's balk a particularly dastardly deed. The ball is dead and every runner, including the B/R and regardless of circumstance, advances one base. It combines the balk penalty with the CI penalty. If the OBR left the ball alive instead of killing it, in the same manner as a normal instance of catcher's interference, the batter would be awarded first and R3 would score anyway as he was trying to advance on the pitch. In nearly every case, 7.07 would be superfluous. The balk call is used not to justify the advance of R3, but the advance of R2, who is awarded third on the interference even if he was not forced and was not trying to advance. R1, of course, is always forced.
The balk is merely for the sake of consistency to explain the advance of a non-stealing, non-forced R2 when that is the case.
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SOME (but not all) OBR sources hold that 7.07 is an error and should be ignored entirely. That is, an non-stealing, non-forced R2 would not be awarded third on CI during a steal / squeeze.
Like so many other things in OBR, we'll have to wait for that long-rumored rewrite to resolve the issue.