[chymechowder]

[apologies for the length of this post!]

USSSA mens slow pitch

We're in the bottom of the 11th inning. That, in and of itself, is wrong. The league rules say you can only play 2 extra innings, then it ends in a tie. But it was our last of 3 games and we weren't up against the town's 10pm curfew yet. The players wanted to do a 10th inning so we said OK. We're tied after 10 and they ask to play one more. We say OK again. Both sides love us (that would soon change, haha).

Tie game bottom 11. One out, runners on 1st and 2nd. Line drive to shallow left center. The outfielder gets a glove on the ball and drops it. Pretty sure it was intentional, but there's nothing in the rules about an outfielder intentionally dropping the ball, right?

So now the chaos begins. Everyone's yelling. The runners are going, stopping, going. LCF throws to 2nd. My partner calls an out there (though nobody can hear him over all the clamor). 2B throws to third. I'm coming up the line. The throw beats the runner but 3B doesn't tag him. Then he throws over to first.

The defense is celebrating, the offense is confused and protesting. Players are all over the infield. I call time and huddle up with my partner to try and make sense of what just happened.

OK so we've got a force out at 2nd. But on the throw to third, there's no tag, and since the force play is off, we've got him safe. So we say 2 outs, runners at 1st and 3rd.

BUT the defense says they have an out at 1st, too, because they claim the batter never went to first. We say, NO, when the throw went to 1st the batter was there. But they're insisting that the batter walked back to his bench (on the first base side) because he had thought the ball was caught in LCF.

We huddle up again. And here's the problem: neither of us watched the batter. Totally our fault, but in all the confusion we lost track of him. Of course he's standing there NOW, but the defense says he wasn't there when the throw went to first.

I can tell that the defense isn't trying to snow us. And I now have a creeping suspicion that we mistook either the original runner on 1st or maybe the base coach for the batter. But neither my partner nor I could definitively say that the batter HADN'T been on first.

So we stick with the call. Next guy hits a grounder and the 3B boots it. Game over. Defense is pissed. (They might miss the playoffs now.) They're imploring the offense to admit that the batter hadn't run to 1st, but the offense isn't going to cop to it.

I'm pretty sure we kicked that call something fierce. But absent the KNOWLEDGE that the batter hadn't advanced to 1st, we couldnt just take the defense's word for it--however convincing it was.

Sooooo, what, if anything, would you guys do? Aside from the obvious: 1. don't play those two extra innings (luckily, nobody got hurt!); and 2. pay attention to the batter/runner.

Should we tell the league that we played 2 innings that we shouldnt have and that the game should've ended in a tie? While that appears to my sense of fairness, it's a little too close to being an advocate for a team. (Plus, I expect the losing team will do that on their own.)

As for apologizing to a team in situations like this, do you do that? I pretty much did that after the game, acknowledging that we very well may have blown the call, but unfortunately we can't call an out based solely on their argument.

Ugh.