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Let me see if I've got this right.
You are behind the plate. You judge that a hit batter did not attempt to avoid the pitch, or allowed himself to be hit by intentionally sticking a body part in the ball's path.
You tell him to stay put and call a ball, because the batter contacted the ball outside of the strike zone.
Sounds good so far.
Then, you let your partner (I take it you mean your partner, or base umpire, by "your only friend out there") overrule your judgement call?
To answer your question, "What should I do?", the first thing you should do is stick with your original call. That is your call to make, you made it, based on your judgement, and you should live-or-die with it. It sounded like the right call. No way can your partner "overrule" you on this!
Your next move might be to dump the coach that went "ballistic".
But, again, your scenario is a little bit different than the one presented in the referenced magazine article.
How about this? Tie game, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded. 3-2 count on the batter.
The pitch is right down the middle of the plate, belt high. Or, it would have been had the batter not reached out with his hand and deflected the ball just barely in front of the plate. You can change "reaching with the hand" to any other form of intentionally contacting the pitch you like- sticking out an elbow, shoulder or even his head.
What do you do then? Award the base based on ball four? Allow the batter to decide the game based on his unsportsmanlike conduct? Call strike three?
That is the scenario presented in the article. It wasn't a typical "hit batter" play, or a discussion of the "hit batter" rule. It was a discussion of one very specific situation and how the author would rule in that specific situation.
The author of the article called, essentially, "no pitch", warned the batter and his coach and threatened ejection if this happened again. He made this call based on rule 10-2-3-g (it was a FED game).
Now...what would YOU do?
[Edited by BretMan on Mar 4th, 2006 at 06:35 PM]
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