Fair or Foul Pole

[akalsey]

No fair/foul decision can be made until the ball touches something or someone past 1st or 3rd base. If it goes 50 feet foul in the air and gets blown back to hit the pole...guess what...Fair ball. [/B]

OBR doesn't specifically cover this. The definition of a fair ball says that it's fair if passes out of the playing field while over fair territory, but there's no corollary for a foul ball. The definition of a fould bal doesn't specifically say what happens if a foul ball passes from the field in foul territory and doesn't return.

The foul pole should be mounted on the fence. Otherwise there's not much point in having a pole to begin with. If it's not, the field's ground rules should cover what happens to a ball that strikes the pole after leaving the field in foul territory. By common sense and interpolation, I'd say the ground rule should say that a ball striking the foul pole below the fence line should be ruled fair or foul relative to it's position when it left the field. So after leaving the field in foul territory it would be ruled a foul ball should it strike the pole below the fence. This is also going to be the easiest thing for an umpire to rule, since once the ball drops below the fence the umpire wouldn't likely see it even hit the pole and therefore would be ruling foul anyway since that's where it left the field.