Game Date: Feb 23, 2032
Signings:
Philadelphia signed SP Ralph Turner (5 yrs/$49.5m) and SP Alejandro Baez (3 yrs/$33m) to contract extensions.
League Notes:
The next sim will take place tomorrow night and take us to the start of Spring Training. The sim after that will be on Sunday.
Lastly, I'm still curious what you think of the hypothetical situation I presented in the previous post. How would you rule?
Zev
7.03(b). “A game shall be forfeited to the opposing team when a team is unable or refuses to place nine players on the field.”
ReplyDeleteThe rule appears to be written with regard to the defensive aspect of the game, where players are placed on the field simultaneously in their defensive positions. The rule could just as well have added a clause after “nine players on the field” that says something like one of the following two options (1) “, or cannot place nine players in its batting lineup” or (2) “, or does not have nine players available to play.” Given that batting is different than fielding; and that being “available to play” would encompass either batting or defense, it is at least reasonable to conclude that the rule was drafted specifically to apply once the ejected player's team had to play defense. If the rule had been intended to apply to the hitting lineup, a clause similar to (1) could have been included. If the rule had been intended to apply to the general availability of nine players, regardless of whether hitting or fielding at the time of being “unable to place nine players”, then a clause similar to (2) could have been included.
The omission of either a (1) or (2) type clause might seem unintentional. But such clauses were also within the drafters' ability to include. Since no such clause was not included, the assumption should be the omission was intentional, and that rule 7.03(b) does not apply until the 8-man team has to put players on the field, at the same time, to play defense.
It is certainly understandable to read the word “unable” as meaning “lacking the present ability.”I tried looking in the MLB rules to see if there was another, separate rule that required nine batters in the lineup. Even searched the pdf file for occurrences of the word “nine.” Interestingly, nowhere did I run across a requirement of “nine” hitters. Not even in the “lineup” section of the rules. The comment under rule 4.03 alludes to a situation where the manager has “inadvertently listed only eight men in the batting order”, but does not, strictly speaking, appear to have a rule that flat-out says there has to be “nine” men in the batting order. If that rule exists, mlb must have used the numeral “9” to denote it, because the full word “nine” does not appear within any such rule. So I then tried searching the numeral “9”. The occurrences of the numeral “9” were so numerous I gave up searching somewhere in the middle of Section 5. Interestingly, along the way I didn't see anything that would prevent you from having more than 9 players in the lineup, or on the field. That obviously can't be right. Perhaps there is a more detailed version of the rules somewhere?
In any event, my review of the rules available on mlb.com did not shed any further light on the matter. Accordingly, I must conclude, for the foregoing reasons and based only the rules I was able to find and review, that the answer to the question is that the batting team may continue to hit until the inning concludes, and would not face a forfeit until taking the field the following inning.
Two (or more) glaring grammatical errors aside (I don't see a way to edit these posts) I don't know what else I could have concluded. FWIW, here is a link to the rules http://mlb.mlb.com/documents/0/8/0/268272080/2018_Official_Baseball_Rules.pdf
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember having been informed in the past that there are more detailed MLB rules available somewhere else; in the past I've had occasion to look up the rules and I seem to recall that these are an abridged version (though I didn't catch where that was noted).
Tom,
ReplyDeleteThere are other rules, but those are front-office rules (think of the "Rule 5 draft" and "Rule 21" (the rule against gambling). As far as playing rules go, the ones on the MLB site are the official and complete rules.
Zev