Logic escapes SEC baseball rule book
Published 6:00 pm Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Early in life, young and eager true students of baseball sit at the knee of their grandpappies or somebody handy and get told that it’s really pretty simple.
More than any other sport, all baseball — the official scoring and whatnot — is based on logic.
For the most part, it’s true.
But the Southeastern Conference evidently never got that little fireside chat.
Yes, they’re at it again, folks.
The tried-and-tried rules of the game are pretty much the same as everywhere in the conference, and the SEC officiates and enforces them about as well as anybody.
The SEC dominates college baseball. Nine of the last 10 College World Series had at least one conference team in the finals. Two of them were all-SEC finals, including Florida’s win over LSU last June.
The SEC rules the game.
SEC officials just don’t ground-rule the game very well.
It’s when they have to think outside the white lines, get away from balls and strikes and tie goes to the runner, that they get tangled up in their own shoelaces.
Then the conference often looks like a batter staring dumbfounded and slump-shouldered at a bending third strike down the middle.
Where on earth do they come up with these special rules? Who thought up some of this stuff?
Presumably the coaches had to sign off on them. But do they ever check to see if maybe some of their handiwork needs updating?
The latest head-scratcher came Sunday in Nashville to bring a curious end to an otherwise very good weekend of baseball between Vanderbilt and LSU.
The conference pretty much spares us the torture of tie games these days, albeit through no fault of its rules.
That once-chronic problem, which, tied or not, could halt a game dead in its tracks with strict curfews depending on a visiting team’s scheduled flight plans out of town, has mostly been eradicated.
When a team has chartered a flight, which most of them do now, the Sunday getaway curfew rule isn’t in effect. The plane isn’t going anywhere without them.
But it doesn’t solve everything, for no particular reason.
When it comes to dealing with very foreseen circumstances of weather, the SEC guidebook looks like the U.S. tax code, with all sorts of subsections and bylaws and more than a few and/or’s and wherefores.
They had to dust off a deep, musty chapter Saturday night when a lightning and rain storm hit Vanderbilt’s quirky ballyard with two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning and LSU leading 6-2, in the middle of a 2-1 count.
Eventually they had to send everybody home for the night.
That’s when you lean back, get some peanuts and crackerjacks, and wonder what they’re going to pull out of the rule book this time.
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Contrary to rumor, they don’t make it up as they go.
It’s right there.
There’s a different stipulation for just about every day of the week.
In this case, it was decreed LSU and Vanderbilt return at 10 a.m. Sunday and finish the second game.
But Game 3, which would start at noon — wait for the punch line — would be shortened to seven innings.
I’ll quote you chapter and verse, under subsection 3 of the inclement weather contingency plans: “If a suspended game is resumed on Sunday, the regularly scheduled game shall be seven innings.”
Why? Who knows?
Probably an oversight. Maybe some relic left over from the days when teams wore handlebar moustaches and traveled by stagecoach.
At best, they were overthinking this one.
So, of course, LSU needed only about 10 minutes to finish off Vanderbilt in the resumption of Game 2.
So the two teams sat around and stared at each other for better than an hour and a half.
The firm noon start time was understandable — the game was being televised, and the networks get annoyed when you start without them.
But why only seven innings?
Of course, the rule ended up looking silly. Vanderbilt won 1-0, and the game took 1 hour, 31 minutes to play.
Blink and you missed it.
Ordinarily in college baseball an hour and a half is enough to get you through the national anthem and maybe a quick out or two.
But this was a strange freshmen pitching duel. Quick work, effective stuff, from both LSU’s Ma’Khail Hilliard and Vandy’s Mason Hickman.
But wait a minute. Did they skip an inning or something?
A couple of commercial breaks and they were done. That can’t be the end.
It was the baseball version of sushi — pretty good stuff, appetizing enough, just not very filling. Seven very quick innings? It made you want to stop at Taco Bell on the way home.
Didn’t theses guys just take infield? Now they’re shaking hands at the end of the weekend.
It was barely 1:30 in the afternoon. And they were done. A lot of Sunday games don’t start until 2 p.m. — and they’re allowed to go the full nine.
So, to recap, on Saturday, in a game that started at 8 p.m Nashville time, LSU and Vanderbilt played 82⁄3 innings without settling anything.
On Sunday, under glorious skies with an entire morning and afternoon to kill, they played eight innings to get two results.
Where’s the logic in that?
Scooter Hobbs covers LSU
athletics. Email him at
shobbs@americanpress.com