Left Early on a Caught Fly

[bob jenkins]

Originally Posted by johnnyg08

In this case one and the same...he's not going to be on the base mid-dive yelling "appeal, appeal, appeal"

No one said he needed to yell anything.

IMO, the action of catch and appeal would be nearly simultaneous...in this play, we need to call what is expected, not necessarily the black and white of the rule. To me, that would be the proper call to make in interpreting spirit of the appeal rule.

If he makes some action like swatting at the base with his glove, or sticking out his leg to touch the base, or ... then that meets the "umistakeable" spirit of the rule. Just stumbling over the base because of gravity, doesn't. Heck, if F5 thought he had made an appeal, he wouldn't have dived back at the base.

[johnnyg08]

I agree with you...seeing the entire situation allows me to "see" the scenario better as I stated in the last sentence of my previous post.

The issue with some of these scenarios is that at least for me, I picture it a certain way and you picture it another way, neither of us were wrong in ruling based on what we thought we saw by reading his initial post.

Since mbcrowder completely rewrote the post with the whole story, I know the rule, and I would agree with bob, mbcrowder, and rich, but I will defend my post based upon what I thought I "saw" in the original post. "accidental" was your judgment based on what you saw...I saw something different. I don't want to split hairs here guys, this is a good discussion and in mbcrowder's new and improved post, I would've called it the same way...and probably told the UIC something similar too. Funny that they didn't protest the game before he got dumped though...(yes, he would've lost the protest)