Interp of the Week #3 - ANSWER

[Jim Porter]

PLAY: The batter smacks the ball down into the soft dirt, and it dribbles slowly up the first baseline. The batter is off with contact, and the catcher is close on his heels. The BR avoids contact with the ball as he passes it, while F2 follows closely behind the BR. As F2 reaches down to glove the ball, the BR's heel hits F2's glove during the BR's back-stride, and the tripped BR falls flat on his face. F2 picks up the ball and tags the BR, who's still lying in a heap on the ground.

Your call?

RULING: Call obstruction and award the batter-runner first base.

It was a tight race this week. The winner is Warren Willson, and an Honorable Mention goes to Umpyre007.

(Umpyre007 almost had it all, except one sentence in which he said, "any time the BR is tripped from behind it is obstruction," which, unfortunately, does not prove out completely.)

Warren has supplied all of the information, including the very play from JEA which was the catalyst for Interp of the Week #3.

This play illustrates the importance of the concept of fielder privilege, as well as our recognition of it on the ball field.

As we all know, a fielder is privileged when he is judged to be in the act of making a play on a batted or thrown ball. Such a privileged fielder cannot be guilty of obstruction.

However, a catcher is not privileged when a ball is batted around the plate area, and during the batter-runner's initial advance to first base. Instead, a special status exists in which any unintentional contact between the two is normally incidental.

This special status exists when the batter-runner has begun his advance toward first, as long as the batter-runner is doing what he is supposed to be doing (J/R, BRD). In this scenario, however, the batter-runner had begun his advance, and then passed by the catcher. The special status had ended, and the batter-runner was illegally obstructed by the unprivileged catcher.

As far as Umpyre007's assertion that all trips from behind are obstruction, he is mostly correct. Sometimes, with a privileged fielder, the runner could trip himself from behind on the privileged fielder causing interference. Had this week's situation occurred elsewhere on the diamond, the runner might be out for interference instead, since it was his heel which initiated the contact. It is important who intitiates the contact when a runner is tripped from behind by a privileged fielder.

However, the wisdom of Umpyre007's input to this thread should not go unrecognized. In the Pro's, anytime contact is initiated by a privileged fielder which trips a runner from behind, it is considered intentional and obstruction - period. This solves the problem of judging intent in a play which just begs a fielder to trip a runner. It keeps the fielder from being able to fool the umpires into believing his contact was unintentional.