Babe Ruth Contact at the Plate
 

As most of you know, I am no longer on the field. All my time is spent doing evaluations, now. I ran into an incident on the past Sunday the has me questioning the outcome. The umpires are HS umpires so their main knowledge is Federation rules (not an excuse, just some information). We all know that the Babe Ruth rules are not available on line and my book is more than a few years old.

Age = 16U
Rules = Babe Ruth
0 outs
R3 & R1

Batter hits a shot to F7 who muffs the catch but hits the cutoff man on target. R3 takes off on the muffed catch and is running head down at full speed. F2 is in the process of receiving the throw from the cut off when R3 realizes there is going to be a collision. R3 puts up his arms in a defensive position and there is contact (not a collision). F2 never had control of the throw and the ball goes back to the backstop. DC wants something for the contact, stating "There can be no collisions at the plate - it's slide or avoid!". The PU (the umpire I was evaluating) then walked over to the OC and simply talked to him and from my vantage point, I could not hear anything.

Today, the BU called to inform me that the PU actually called R3 out and ejected him for Malicious Contact (thus the FED training). Now, I know that there is no Malicious Contact in Babe Ruth and Babe Ruth is OBR based. My question is has there been a rule change about contact at the plate? So far, my assigner, rules man and president all seem to think that you can't have contact at the plate causing (I hate to say this) a "must slide" scenario when coming home. As far as I know, there is no rule like this in Babe Ruth.

This is out of the 2012 book and applies to all ages: "If a runner attempting to reach home plate intentionally and malisicously runs into a defensive player in the area of home plate, he will be called out on the play and ejected from the game. The objective of this is to penalize the offensive team for deliberate, unwarranted, unsportsmanlike action by the runner for the obvious purpose of crashing the defensive player, rather than trying to reach home plate. Obviously, this is an umpire's judgement call."

Yes, there IS a MC in BRB. It has been in there since approx 1994, before then there was no rule. There is no must slide or avoid rule.

Play does not sound like MC as described.

There is not a must slide rule at the plate that I'm aware of either. And this play by your writing does not sound like MC to me.

If he did something malicious or tried to injure the F2 that would be different, but as long as F2 doesn't have the ball in his glove the runner has to have someway to get to the plate etc.,

Sounds like a baseball play with a little bit of contact which happens sometime.

Thanks
David

Does not matter whether F2 has the ball, only matters whether PU judges the contact to be malicious.

Thank you all.... As I said, my Babe Ruth information is rather dated. I'm glad I checked this out with y'all.