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May 01, 2008



I saw the video on Fox this morning. There is A lot to be proud of about those kids.

John Thacker

Unfortunately, part of the story is that the umpire blew the call. The rules of baseball and softball both address this issues, amazingly enough. If a player is injured in the middle of a dead ball situation, a substitute is allowed to come in and advance any bases recorded. The ump was completely wrong to say that a pinch runner would stop at first.

Colby Cosh has the story. Note that this has happened in MLB; here's a list of examples from Retrosheet that Colby points out.

John Thacker

Sorry, closing tags.


How does one close the tags after posting? I'm sure I'll leave them open at some point, if I haven't already, but don't know how to undo the mistake.


Apparently these women understood the spirit of the rules, even if the officials did not.

Girls are great, aren't they?

While I can't say guys would never do such a thing, as a father of five grown daughters all of whom actively participated in sports, I am confident that it would be much more likely that girls would do something like this and feel that it was just part of the game.

This type of sportswomanship was totally foreign to me until fatherhood opened my eyes to the profound differences between the sexes in competitive sports.

Male coaches in female sports must adjust to more than physical differences between genders or they will be totally unsuccessful.

Jim Glass

"The umpires ruled that if Tucholsky could not make it around the bases, two runs would score but she would be credited with only a single... Then Mallory Holtman, the powerful first baseman for Central Washington, said words that brought a chill to everybody who heard them:

“Excuse me, would it be O.K. if we carried her around and she touched each bag?”

The umpires huddled and said it would be legal...

Why does everybody so praise this blatant use of a technicality to defeat the clearly stated intent of the rules?

First the Rules of Baseball, then the Commerce Clause*, then the whole dang Constitution.

And all right, so it wasn't against the rules of baseball -- everybody involved thought it was, and isn't that what matters as to the ethics of the situation?

Next we'll all be praising people who bribe judges into giving illegal verdicts that seem kind hearted and that they don't know are correct. Woe unto us all.

* OK, it was the Commerce Clause first...


I'm surprised to see you say that, vnjagvet. I don't know how anyone in Holtman's situation, and unaware of the rule John Thacker pointed out, could act differently.


No, Jim, nobody involved thought it was against the rules. The player asked the umpires if it would be ok, and the umpires ruled it was legal. Go yell at people doing 58 in a 55 zone.


I agree with vnjagvet. It's a girl thing.Boys do sweet things , too--often in cases where girls would not, but NOT in competition like this.


Boys playing baseball can be sweet, too. About 25-30 years ago, when my knees hurt too much to umpire any more, I began coaching boys' baseball. Now, mind you I like baseball, but I was never real good at it myself.
Anyway, for a couple of years I coached the 9-11 age group in our small town (and I let the first girl join the team when I found out the league had no rules against it). My daughter still lives there although I'm now about 600 miles away.
Anyway, last summer on a visit to see my grandkids, my daughter brought this guy up to me and said, "Dad, do you remember this idiot?" (And he was grinning like he had a certain amount of brain damage, as my grandma would have said.) I had to admit I didn't, and he introduced himself as one of my former players, now 35 or so with kids of his own.
He said he was coaching the 9-11 team and he was trying to teach them what he had learned from me. I was kinda puzzled, because, as I said, I wasn't really good at baseball, so I asked him what that was.
He said, "Everyone who shows up to every practice gets to play. No one complains about playing time or the position they play. If everyone plays as hard and as well as they can, after the game everyone gets ice cream. We don't win many games (and neither did my teams), but I want them to have as much fun and learn as much as I did."
I'm not sure I ever got a nicer compliment.

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