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Originally Posted by jsblanton
Sitting in the bleachers watching a 12 year old travel team game, B1 hits a ground ball to F3 who goes to his right to field it. F3 knocks down the grounder and beats the batter-runner to the bag. F3 ran across the bag into foul territory and batter-runner runs into F3. BU makes a good strong out call as it was a fairly close play. PU calls BU over to talk about the contact (I can hear them) between the BR and F3. BU calls BR safe, back to first, and tells def. coach there is a "no contact rule" and his fielder violated that rule, therefore the call at first is safe. Coach calmly talks with BU for a very short period of time and begrudgingly accepts the call. He latter asked me about the play and if I have ever heard of such a rule before. I replied "I don't think I have". I thought the rulebook covered situations that involved contact very well. I don't understand why a "no contact rule" would be put in place. (obviously the safety of the players) I guess I think the rule may have been misapplied in this situation. Any comments or experiences with a rule like this? If no contact was allowed between runners and fielders you could never have a tag-out, right?
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No contact rules tend to be crafted by the local league and as often as not are not well thought out. Without access to the league rule book we can only guess whether the rule was correctly applied.