[greymule]

With no lines, I call it only if it's flagrant. Last summer, in an ASA tournament, a batter ran out in front of home plate and hit the ball, so I called it then. Nobody on either team said anything. Of course, most people don't know that the box extends 4 feet up from the side point of the plate, so whenever any batter runs up at all, I hear screams of "out of the box." A lot of ASA catchers will point at where a batter's foot was and try to get a call, but I think they do it half kidding, even when the batter might actually have stepped slightly beyond where a drawn line would have been.

In in ASA tournament about 20 years ago, I saw a team give up 10 runs in the top of the first inning but then hold the other team and scratch back to 10-9 in the bottom of the seventh. Bases loaded, two out, guy gets a hit to left, driving in two runs to win the game. Everybody piles on the guy in celebration, but when the noise dies down they find the umpire waving everything off and calling the guy out for being out of the box. He claimed that the batter (who had not run up but had planted his right foot and taken the normal one step with his left) had stepped beyond the BACK SIDE line of the box. This with the typical sandy batter's box and no visible lines whatsoever. A "discussion" followed.