[wrigleywannabe]

We had an interesting situation arise in a rec league tourney tonight, that I was wanting to get some thoughts on.

Two outs and a runner on third.

Strike two had just been thrown.

The runner, thinking it's strike three and the third out, starts slowly walking to the dugout, taking her helmet off in the process.

Ball has been returned to the pitcher. I look over and see what the runner is doing. At this point, I watch her take a couple of steps, she's probably 15 feet off the bag, almost to the dugout.

In my mind, I'm thinking (real fast, of course)...1. That's only strike two. 2. Once in a while, we'll have both teams get messed up on outs and everyone runs off the field, which we just send everyone back. 3. Wait, this is tourney and she's the only one moving. 4. It's her coach who screwed her up, for some reason yelling "go" to the batter on strike one, when it was dropped. This led to the bench jokingly yelling go on the previous pitch that wasn't even a strike. 5. Get her !!!!!

I yell at the pitcher to throw to third. Causing the other team to try to get her to go back. Pitcher turns and looks, sees the runner, throws over. We have her by two steps, but the third basemen drops the ball.

The ump says, "she's out anyway".

My immediate thought is, of course, she didn't immediately go one way or the other, when the pitcher received the ball.

Then, I think, wait, there was a play made.

However, all and all, by the time she caught it, we noticed what was happening, yelled to her, she tuns, with the ball at her side, to see the runner (not making any kind of play or attempted play) and the 3B gets there, five seconds probably occurred before any play.

That's five seconds of the base runner walking towards the dugout while the pitcher has the ball in the circle. This makes me think that the look back rule was properly enforced.

When I got home, I got to thinking. From what I saw, the runner never stopped moving. She wasn't walking very fast and it was to the dugout, but she never stopped, keeping the look back rule from coming into play.

I do some local umping, usually 11U rec, since I coach in 14U. I was IHSAA certified some years back. Never did any games, just wanted the cert.

I try to keep up on the rules and am in charge of softball umpires for our league. I think, or like to anyway, that I have a decent grasp on "controversial rules".

This one has me curious. Would the look back rule apply here?.

I thought there might be a case for a baseline issue, as well. However, runners establish their own line and her movement to the dugout was not to avoid a tag and she went directly back to the bag when returning.

We play IHSAA rules.

As a side note, we wound up winning 11-10 in extra innings.

Two years ago, we won it all and had a bunch age up.

Last year, we went winless with an extremely young team. Four of our top five reentered the draft (The whole everyone wants to get on a good team, but doesn't want to work at it story) Two being in the top five players in the league this year.

We went winless again, losing our top draft pick and new best player, who quit for the same reasons, along the way. Before tonight, we had gone 0-31 in two years.

3 of those 4 who redrafted were specifically trying to get on the team we played tonight and succeed in doing so. In fact, one was the runner on third.

Sorry for the long ramble. That end part wasn't relevant, but 3 and 1/2 hours later I'm still jacked up from the looks on the girls faces when they got the final out (a big strikeout, at that)

Heck, one of our 12 year olds even started crying because she was so happy.