Retired Runner Hit with Throw

[BretMan]

Originally Posted by Manny A

Only one veteran umpire at our clinic believed INT should be called, because he felt the rule on retired runners doesn't give the player any leeway if she continues to run in her path.

Picture the typical "turn-two" play at second base. The fielder steps on the bag, pivots and fires the ball all in one fluid motion. The amount of time that elapses between the touch of the base (ie: the instant that the runer is out) and the ball hitting the runner can be maybe one second.

My questions to the "veteran umpire" would be:

- Can you really consider whatever the runner did in that fraction of a second between being put out and getting hit by the ball as "continuing to run in her path"?

Up until the instant that the base is touched, the runner is perfectly within her rights to be running on a straight line directly to the base. What exactly are you expecting her to do differently in the one second between being retired and being hit?

And she's not out until the umpire declares her out. Is the umpire making this call really going to signal the out, and the runner going to process that she really is out, all in that one second. That seems an unreasonable expectation.

- What do you think satisfies a requirement to not continue running the instant you're put out? Should the runner stop in her tracks? Veer off? Duck?

- Do you expect the runner to begin veering off or to start ducking before she's even put or declared out?

If you think that she has some responsibility to "get out of the way", and she doesn't reasonably have time to make an evasive move the second she's called out, then the only way to do that would be to stop/veer off/duck before she's even put out.

This requires a runner to act as if she is out (get out of the way) when she is still a legal and viable runner. Okay, so let's say she does this. Then, the fielder at second drops the ball or misses the bag. Ooops! Now the runner is not out and we have just severely handicapped her effort to run the bases by requiring her to act as if she's out when she really wasn't!