loose equipment and ricochet fair batted ball
 

Edited to include full paragraph. UIC section of 2009 DVD casebook

Detached equipment hit by a thrown ball: Rule 8, Section 5 G 3

If the detached equipment belongs to the offensive team, the player being played on is out. If no apparent play is obvious, an out should not be called. The ball is dead and all runners return to the last base touched at the time of the interference. If a fair batted ball ricochets off a fielder or a base and hits equipment in foul territory, the ball remains live. If a batted ball hits any equipment in foul territory, the ball should be called foul immediately.

Anyone heard of this before or discussed it? It is on page 54 under detached equipment.

Depends... Whose equipment is it?

doesn't say.

ASA RS #17 says if a thrown ball strikes loose equipment belonging to the offense, it's an immediate dead ball. If it belongs to the defense, it's two bases from time of throw.

On a fair batted ball, it again depends on who owns the equipment. If it's the offense's equipment, all runners return to their bases at time of pitch, and the BR is awarded 1B. Runners advance, if forced. If it belongs to the defense, all runners (including the BR) are awarded two bases.

The exception to all of this is if it's equipment that's SUPPOSED to be in the game that inadvertently falls off the player (ie., a runner's helmet that falls off while they run the bases). The two keys are whether or not the equipment is supposed to be on the field, and whether or not it simply fell off (vs. being intentionally removed).

It's possible the DVD was referring to equipment that had accidentally fallen off of a player.

Both cases above, Dave, ball is dead. In this sit, ball remains live.

You do programming and it is logic based. In addition, the sentence introduces a specific particular (ricochets) and an unmodified noun (equipment). Logically then, it means any and all, a universal not a particular (offensive or defensive). That is how I read it.

For you UIC's, what do you make of this?

Sorry, I didn't clarify. That "exception" I mentioned is when the ball remains live. :)

I do programming myself, and it gets me into a lot of trouble when I try to read the rule book... that's why I always come here to get straightened out after I read it. There are plenty of rules in the book that simply don't mean what they say.
________
Medical marijuana card

Think of the rules as functions(), not one big main(); :)

It'll make more sense if you think of it that way.

/geek;

Please explain or pm with explanation. Sounds interesting to me.

Thanks.

Oh man... That'd take a while. :)

In programming, you have different functions that will handle or evaluate certain tasks, and each function is read sequentially. First do this, then do that, then do the other thing. If your program is really short (and I do mean REALLY short), you'd probably have just one function called main(). All of your commands are in this one function, run in the exact order in which they're written down (like a repair manual).

However, these days, programs are never that short. As a result, you need to "break things up" in order to keep from re-writing the same thing over and over again. For example, if your program needs to display error messages under varying conditions, you'd write a function that handles this task and "call" that function when you need it. This is better than writing the code over and over again in the one long main() function.

So to a programmer, the best way to approach the rule book is NOT to look at it as one long, sequential document where everything follows the exact order laid out in the book (ie., one long main() function). The game is dynamic, and you need to treat it as such, calling up the various functions and subroutines as they come along.

You'd probably have about 1,000 separate functions. ;)