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Wow, one minute this thread has 4 replies and the next minute it's 2 pages long! I have to be honest with you Tony and Whowefoolin that if I had to call THIS play over again I definitely would have called the IF. While pondering this situation on the way home that day my gut told me that I had made the wrong call. The reason was because of the triple play. I KNOW why there is an IF rule. It's to protect the runners from a DP or god forbid a triple play. Any umpire would know that. I just got hooked on the "with ordinary effort" thing. Why, I honestly don't know. Haven't you ever done something and then just wondered why you did it. Ahh, the beauty of hindsight. I felt so bad about the call that I called the coach to apologize for my blunder. That's just me though and I felt a lot better about it afterwards.
Maybe things would have been different if this were a high school or college game but I doubt it. This was a Pony level game. The bottom line is that I knew even before posting this thread that I screwed up. I was just hoping that someone else would learn from my mistake. I do appreciate the support though.
BTW, the shoulder thing I referred to was when let's say the SS goes out on the grass to catch a potential IF a general rule to determine ordinary effort is to see whether his shoulders are square to you or if he is still running out to catch the ball. In other words, is he facing you as he makes the catch (shoulders square to you) or are his shoulders turned as he is running out to make the catch. If they are square to you then THAT'S "ordinary effort" meaning he's camped out under the ball, a "can of corn" so to speak. The problem is that you don't have much time to make that decision.
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