Fielder's balk?

[drumsub]

@umpjim, all baseball rulebooks derived from MLB. They've undergone changes since the first writing, and of course there are differences, but you can still see parts that are the same wording, or organized the same way. Maybe there's a league out there other than MLB that sat down and wrote a rule book from scratch, but I've seen no evidence of that.

And I'm saying it's debated and misapplied in youth leagues all over the US. That's obvious from the existence of threads like this one.

My point is that due to all the derivative rule books out there you've got various iterations of the rule with different wording, indentations, etc. It doesn't matter what X's interpretation guide says to someone in Y league, and the existence of that interp guide probably isn't known to that person. My point is that the confusion could have been put to rest by MLB addressing it as they do so many other rules via a short note in the rule book way back when.

I remember this thing sparked in the 80's because Keith Hernandez had it called on him and then every ump in my area was calling it because they saw it in an MLB game (or so the rumor went, I didn't actually see it myself, but as a young umpire I believed what the older guys taught). So there has obviously been confusion over the years.