1978 Yankees Red Sox

[greymule]

As I remember it, sometime in the early 1960s MLB put in the one-second stipulation (to replace a sort of undefined "stop") and instructed the umpires to enforce the rule strictly. (Or maybe the one-second rule existed but had been ignored until then.) There were so many balks called, and so many arguments, that by 1964 it simply became a "stop" again. I pitched under OBR rules between 1964 and 1972, and all you had to do was change direction. Hands in and out would do it, since theoretically, with a reverse of direction, you had to have stopped somewhere in there. But in those days they didn't really call balks anyway, except in the most obvious cases.

The old films are great. From the 1940s, you see gloves on the outfield grass, umpires with the right arm in the air before the ball hits the mitt, catchers standing almost fully upright as the pitcher's arm comes around, and the 1B umpire making calls in the little area between the bag and the coach's box. And they made all the calls immediately. Anything less than a full swing was considered checked, and I don't know what a runner had to do to be called for INT at 2B. Apparently they did have a crash rule, which went something like "the runner must crash into a fielder who is attempting to tag him."