hi folks

remind me, please, when you use the R1, R2, R3 abbreviations, exactly what would each of those refer to?

thanks in advance

R1= Runner closest to home, R2= succeeding, R3= Runner on first base when bases are full.

Ex: R1 is on 3rd and R2 is on first. B3 (the third batter in the inning) is up.

There you go.

R2= succeeding runner (forgot to type runner)

Two notes: you will sometimes see numbers "skipped" to designate outs, example: two outs, R1 on third, R2 on first and B5 at bat.

Also, a few publications will still use the number of the base the runner is on, as in two outs with R1 and R3 to designate runners at first and third. This is used infrequently because (I think) it gets to hard to keep up with advancing runners. "After R1 steals second, an improper batter is discovered"... well is R1 still R1 or is he now R2.

It's just in order of appearance in that inning with R or B depending on their status. The skipped numbers are also used in BOO cases.

It is not a logical system, but these softball fanitics insist on using it(as do their rule makers). If you are on a baseball board, the # refers to the base the runner is occupying at the time the play in question starts.

You just have to learn to shift gears if you live in both worlds.

Roger Greene

Oh no!! Not this battle again! :D

I'm with you Roger. But I think we're in the minority here.

-Kono

It is a completely logical system; it is just not the traditional, sacred, extracted from the holy text passed down out of the mists of the past, baseball system.

Anyway, I insist on using it for clear communication on this board. It'd be fine with me if softball adopted the baseball nomenclature, but until that happens, this is a softball board, and to avoid confusion, we should use softball nomenclature.

The baseball system requires fewer words to set up a situation, but more words to continue describing it. Tomayto, tomahto.

But here on this board, we use the softball system.

Must I remind all of you again that it is baseball which is the imposter, not softball.

R3, R2, & R1 works well
 

Mike, now what would Abner have to say about that? :D

Having R1 closest to home requires that you tell me what base R1 is occupying. In my discussions, I use the other method - R3 is on third. Tomayto:)

Re: R3, R2, & R1 works well
 

So, in other words, you don't care if your posts are confusing, misunderstood, or if you are perceived as being a baseball elitist?

I guess if you can get all of those generalizations from my single statement... I'll have to live with it.:) Tomahto

Re: R3, R2, & R1 works well
 

Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with it. The game of Rounders was a game brought from England which resembles slow-pitch softball more than any incarnation of a game with bases.

R3 on 3rd, R1 on 1st. Was there an out made between the two? You would know that in softball without asking. It's not that big a deal to establish a runner's position through statement.

Of course, it seems to me using a numerical designation in the same progression as they are mathimatically represented makes more sense than worrying about it defining a location.

JMHO,

Rounders?
 

Really? Where can I find some information about this game?

Re: Re: R3, R2, & R1 works well
 

<b><big>The Doubleday Myth</big></b>
Albert Goodwill Spalding, a former player turned sporting goods magnate, convinced himself that baseball must be a purely American invention and, like many true believers, he wanted to convince everyone else as well. When baseball writer and historian Henry Chadwick boldly stated, in Spalding's own Baseball Guide of 1903, that baseball had come from rounders, an English game, Spalding was upset.

He wrote a rebuttal in the 1905 Baseball Guide and proposed that a commission should be formed to investigate the origins of baseball. The members were hand-picked by Spalding himself. Although Abraham Mills was the chairman, most of the "research" was done by James Sullivan of the American Sports Publishing Company, which Spalding owned.

Actually, there wasn't much research involved. But the commission received a letter from Abner Graves, a retired Denver miner in his eighties, who had lived in Cooperstown, New York, as a youth. Graves said that Abner Doubleday had created baseball in 1839, when he was supposedly a student at Green's Select School in Cooperstown. Graves wrote in part:

[Doubleday] improved Town Ball, to limit the number of players, as many were hurt in collisions. . . . He also designed the game to be played by definite teams or sides. Doubleday called the game Base Ball, for there were four bases in it. Three were places where the runner could rest free from being put out, provided he kept his foot on the flat stone base. The pitcher stood in a six foot ring. Anyone getting the ball was entitled to throw it at a runner between bases, and put him out by hitting him with it.

Graves's statement was warmly embraced by the commission--or, at least, by Mills. When he finally published his report on December 30, 1907, he accepted most of the story. He did make one major change, unsubstantiated by any other evidence: He said that Doubleday had eliminated the practice of throwing the ball at the runner while between bases.

Spalding, of course, was delighted. Abner Doubleday, the major general who had fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, was an ideal candidate to be the inventor of baseball. But there were, and are, a lot of problems with the story.

First, there's no evidence that Doubleday ever even set foot in Cooperstown. A native of Ballston Spa, New York, he went to school in Auburn. Second, in 1839 he was a student at West Point, and the school had no summer vacation at that time.

Third, Doubleday left extensive writings and diaries, and never mentioned baseball. Recalling his youth, he wrote, "In my outdoor sports I was addicted to topographical work and even as a boy amused myself by making maps of the country around my father's residence which was in Auburn."

Still, the Mills report was accepted as gospel, although Henry Chadwick called it "a masterpiece of special pleading which lets my dear old friend Albert escape a bad defeat."

In 1937, the State of New York, Cooperstown, and Organized Baseball began making plans to celebrate the sport's supposed centennial by establishing the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. In the midst of the planning, Bruce Cartwright Jr. wrote a letter to baseball officials claiming that his grandfather, Alexander Cartwright of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club had invented baseball in 1845, and he offered his grandfather's diaries as proof. About the same time, researcher Robert Henderson of the New York Public Library submitted irrefutable proof that baseball had been derived from rounders.

The Hall of Fame was, of course, established at Cooperstown, anyway. But Abner Doubleday was not enshrined. Alexander Cartwright was.

source: http://www.hickoksports.com/history/doublday.shtml