So You Think You Know Baseball?: A Fan's Guide to the Official Rules - Softcover

Meltzer, Peter E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039334438X ISBN 13: 9780393344387

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

Essential for armchair umpires and scorekeepers, this guide challenges aficionados on every significant part of the Official Baseball Rules.

Few sports lovers are as obsessed with rules and statistics as baseball fans. In So You Think You Know Baseball?, lifelong baseball enthusiast Peter E. Meltzer catalogues every noteworthy baseball rule from the Major League rulebook and illustrates its application with actual plays, from the historical to the contemporary.

You can read the book from start to finish or consult it while watching a game to understand the mechanics of a play or how it should be scored. Meltzer analyzes the entire Official Baseball Rules using hundreds of Major League plays involving both plays on the field situations and plays which have involved the official scorer. This is the first book ever written which analyzes the entire rulebook in this fashion and which is based on actual plays.

With Meltzer’s unique and thoroughly entertaining guide in hand, which includes a foreword by baseball rules expert Rich Marazzi, you’ll never have to scratch your head over an umpire or scorekeeper’s call again.

21 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Peter E. Meltzer, the author of the best-selling The Thinker’s Thesaurus and So You Think You Know Baseball?, is an attorney and a former professor at Rutgers University School of Law.

Reviews

Citing actual major-league and a few minor-league game situations, Meltzer teases out many of the regulations listed in the far more arid Official Baseball Rules. While some of the cases are a revelation, such as that a major league baseball game cannot begin until the (home-plate) umpire calls, “Play” (4.02), many other cases clarify or expand on rules that fans might already know. For example, Meltzer asks if a batter who’s been ejected while running the bases after a home run can still score. He can, according to rule 9.01 (d). Then Meltzer asks if that runner can still score if he heads straight to the dugout after being ejected, before reaching home plate. He can’t, without having touched all bases (7.02). The situations and their hypotheticals get a little gnarly, slowing the reading (and comprehension) pace to a crawl, but such are the plays that baseball geeks love to follow to their rightful conclusions. All in all, a useful, fan-friendly complement to the indispensable official rules. --Alan Moores

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039334438X
• ISBN 13: 9780393344387
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 386