Monday, March 20, 2023
What is a baserunner?
Last week, I saw a Twitter poll asking if a player who hit a homerun was a baserunner. From there, I generated my own polls, all starting with the same premise: you sent 26 batters to the plate, all 26 were retired, then the 27th batter did something unusual. And so the question at the end was: how many baserunners did this team have for this game?
If you have 27 ground outs, I think we can all agree that we have no baserunners. Even though the batter-runner is running, he's in the runner's lane, and the defense got the batter-runner out. But if he was safe, he's now a baserunner for the next batter. If he got to second base on a double, he is no longer a batter-runner, but a runner going from 1B to 2B (no different than any other runner starting at 1B). If he got thrown out trying to stretch it into a double, he was a runner thrown out at 2B.(*)
(*) Though you can also argue that the runner has to still be on the bases for the next batter. So your typical homerun has no baserunning. Being thrown out at second base on your own turn at bat has no baserunning.
So, it would seem that once the batter SAFELY reaches first base, that establishes that we now have a baserunner.
However.
Let me provide two examples, and you tell me how you see it. You have a fence-clearing hit, where the excited batter skips over first base. The defense will appeal the play at 1B, and the batter is out. The batter gets no HR, no single, no basehit of any kind. There's no walk or hit batter or error or defensive interference. There is nothing positive that happens here in the record book. We have a 27-up, 27-down perfect game. And so, no baserunners. The batter never safely reached first base, never claimed it.
Now, how about a 4-ball walk, with an errant pitch. The batter is awarded first base by the umpire, and in his excitement to try to get to 2nd base on the errant pitch (the ball is live after all), he skips over first base. The defense appeals the play at first base, and the player is out. The exact same thing as happened with the fence-clearing out.
Except.
Well, this is officially a walk, in the scoring rules. In both cases, the walk and the fence-clearing hit, the batter has the right to go to first base without chance of being put out. The batter however has the obligation to touch first base. Once he skips over that obligation, his right to first base no longer exists.
This now becomes a discussion of scoring rules. There's nothing to credit the batter for the fence-clearing hit. You can't give him a single, because he never touched first base. We can give him a walk for the 4-balls, because the umpire awards those on the spot, regardless if the batter does anything with it.
And so, when it comes to deciding what is a baserunner, are we necessarily tied to the idea that it must be based on the scoring rules on the batter? Or, can we say that in either of these extreme cases, the team did not have a baserunner at all. They both did the exact same thing (skipped over first base, out on appeal to first base). They both had the right to go to first base without being putout. The only difference is we have a scoring rule category for one, and not the other.