Baseball has come a long way withstanding “skunks in the outfield”

By John Burbridge

sports@charlescitypress.com

The best advice I ever heard a keynote speaker deliver was when a coach from the USA Swimming Team told a pod of aspiring summer campers that they should always celebrate their victories.

Still, it’s sometimes best to proceed with caution.

During the spring of 1959, Pittsburgh Pirate veteran pitcher Harvey Haddix took a perfect game into the bottom of the 13th against the Milwaukee Braves.

Baseball trivia nerds know that Haddix lost the perfect game and then — simultaneously — the no-hitter and game itself in a tough-luck 1-0 final. But the real nerds know that the score should have been 3-0 if it wasn’t for a wayward base runner by the name of Henry “Hank” Aaron, who was on first base with Felix Mantilla on second — Mantilla “broke up” the perfect game when his infield grounder provoked a throwing error — when Joe Adcock hit what appeared to be a walk-off home run off Haddix.

After rounding second base, Aaron left the basepaths to celebrate the stunning victory with his teammates. Though it didn’t erase Mantilla’s game-winning run as he had already crossed the plate, Adcock’s 3-run homer was downgraded to a single-RBI single.

I was reminded of that bit of baseball history/trivia when witnessing the conclusion of the Waukon-at-Charles City baseball doubleheader earlier this high school season. The Comets finally swept the Indians when Kayden Blunt got plunked with one of his eventual team-leading 15 hit-by-pitches to force in the winning run in the bottom of the 10th of the second game.

But it took a “rhubarb” to make the final official.

Carter Cajthaml was on first base. When Blunt “wore” the game-winning RBI, Cajthaml — like Aaron more than a half-century before him — immediately celebrated with his teammates — but unlike “Hammerin Hank”, didn’t get as far as rounding second.

The Indians immediately protested claiming that Cajthaml should be ruled out for straying from the basepaths. The Comet eighth-grade catcher, who hit nearly .400 with an on-base percentage of over .500 during his first varsity season … perhaps snubbed when not receiving any All-Northeast Iowa Conference Baseball accolades though the conference was graced with several excellent catchers this season … was visibly distraught when it seemed his celebratory mistake was going to nullify his team’s victory.

While the umpiring crew discussed what ruling to ultimately make, the topic of “Skunk in the Outfield” arose from the peanut gallery.

It’s a ploy numerous teams have used — and there’s YouTube evidence of this — where with runners on the corners and desperately needing the runner from third to score, they’ll have the runner on first drift into the outfield. That usually causes a stir from the opposing team as well as the mystified fans, and tends to initiate balks from incredulous pitchers.

The reason for such shenanigans is to direct the defense’s attention enough to lure a rundown crew far enough away from the infield to add several degrees of difficulty in throwing out the other runner if he makes a break to the plate.

Any Captain Obvious in our midst may claim this “skunk in the outfield” should be ruled out for leaving the base path. But though a runner is generally ruled out when he strays more than three feet away from the base path to avoid being tagged …  a runner’s base path is established when the tag attempt occurs and is a straight line from the runner to the base he is attempting to reach safely.

In other words, the established base path to second base could start from the warning track in right-center field if aligned with the initial tag attempt.

Could the basis that allows such base-running anarchy be the reprieve to preserve the Comet victory? After all, how could you penalize Cajthaml for running out the base path when technically one has yet to be established?

As it turned out, the umpires upheld Charles City’s victory by way of a “dead ball” ruling — the ball is ruled dead when it hits a batter, thus, there was no need for the runners other than the one crossing the plate to advance a base (Several experienced coaches and umpires who were in attendance during the game still shake their heads at this ruling).

The late, great Earl Weaver used to marvel at the routine 6-3 putout and how a successfully fielded grounder and strong throw from a shortstop will “always” get a hard-running bid for an infield hit by a step and a half.

“They somehow came up with the perfect distance (90 feet) and diamond size,” Weaver remarked. “How did they do that?”

If Weaver ever attended a Deep River (Hobart, Ind.) Grinders vintage base ball game, he might have gotten an answer. As explained by “Gentleman Jim” Basala, who often served as the top-hat and top-coat clad umpire and historical orator for these Civil War era-rules games, baseball has come the longest way among the other major ball sports when it comes to fine-tuning its dimensions.

Baseball may be the most time-polished “pastime” with the most implacable conservative tenets, but it has embraced notable progressive stands as of late.

When Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to Georgia’s Election Integrity Act, it was accused of being “woke” (even Donald Trump has said the often ill-placed word should be deep-sixed from public discourse). But if you dare to actually read the entire 98-page “act” with its new limitations on the distribution of provisional ballots for those who arrive at the wrong polling place — a common election-day conundrum since the Shelby County vs. Eric Holder Supreme Court ruling in 2013 gutted and made impotent the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prevented pre-clearance hindered states like Georgia from arbitrarily closing polling places and precincts without petitioning the United States attorney general and/or the Washington D.C. district court, you may find MLB’s actions laudable.

Establishing a pitch clock this season is also laudable … it has improved all facets of the game.

You heard it here first: Major League Baseball will be the first professional team sport to fully incorporate Artificial Intelligence in its officiating. And we’re likely to learn even more things we didn’t know about the game thanks to these A.I. umpires.

For instance, they will undoubtedly debunk the oft-repeated myth that a “tie goes to the runner”. With these supercomputers in blue sophisticated enough to measure things down to the planck-length, we’re likely to be shown that almost nothing occurs in this world — let alone in the sports world — simultaneously.

Losing a no-hitter and the game itself with one swing of the bat is the rare exception.