re: Oregon ejection

quote:

---

What exactly is the Oregon player supposed to do there?

---

The only thing I’ve learned this week is that the definition of obstruction is completely different in baseball & softball. They seem to call it quickly in the women’s game & almost never call it in the men’s. I don’t get it

quote:

---

Did he take his eye off the ball because he knew he was about to maliciously get trucked?

---

Did you even watch it one time?
No, you didn’t because if you did you would have seen it bounced in front of him and sailed over his head.

There sure are some stupid ignorant people on here.

He did try to slide and the catcher was without the ball and blocked the entire base path fair and foul. The UMP should have made the Obstruction call the moment the ball bounced off the glove to possibly head off a collision. If the kid was headhunting, the collision would have been fat worse.

Terrible call.

quote:

---

Looks to me like he went to slide, realized he was blocked and just did a pop up rolling into catcher. You can call it malicious but is he just trying to protect himself? Its a tough call

---

it’s the piping up though, how is that protecting himself? if he completes his slide he’s at worse slide tackling the catcher.

instead he popped up and trucked him. it lead to more contact

Lots of just weird in this scenario.

1. The collision w the catcher happened within 2 ft of the edge of home plate. As a general point of interpretation the catcher was still in the process of making the catch (even if he was not in possession) and so the standard in the base path arguments are moot.

2. The runner was steadily drifting inside from the beginning and had an ok line to the plate if he was drifting outside.

3. Biggest issue is that the runner was trying to time his slide by watching the catcher receive the ball so he could look to avoid the tag. The bobble on the throw and the catcher being set up close to the plate made the runner delay before “trying” to slide and he never got down into a legal slide before he hit the catcher.

I don’t like that it means the kid is kicked out for todays game and would have preferred that it never happened, but it easily falls into the malicious contact because he made contact without ever completing the act that would designate it as a slide attempt.

Just a weird play that caught the runner in a no man’s land scenario…

But then again after them letting the Oregon fan behind homeplate have the sign with lights that flash on it all evening, maybe I am a bit less sympathetic that I should be.

There was obstruction, but the way he ran into the catcher is what they called intentional hard hit. Does not make a lot of sense, but that’s what they called.

The ball was already up in the air over and behind the catcher’s head before contact. It’s difficult to tag someone out without the ball.