Baseball's normal awkward moments?

[RShack]

A pop up or fly ball between two or more fielders. You never know who is going to catch it and it is an adventure to it is caught. Simply calling for a ball seems like one of the hardests things to do smoothly

Yeah, this one doesn't make any sense to me at all, but I agree that it happens a lot. I know when I played little league, we did as good or better at it than it seems like some MLB teams do, which is just amazing to me since we were just little kids who couldn't actually play baseball worth a damn. I don't know if the unofficial rules about this have changed or not. But we were told there were standard unwritten baseball rules that dictated who's holler counted most. It's not based who you are, it's based on what position you're playing:

• Any OF'er trumps any IF'er (because the OF'er is coming in with the play in front of him, while the IF'er is going backwards).
• CF trumps corner OF'ers. If the CF hollers something, everybody else shuts up and does what he says. It's part of the CF'ers job to make sure there's no confusion. If there's confusion in the OF, it's the CF'ers fault. If somebody else didn't listen to the CF'er, then it's that guy's fault.
• Middle IF'er trumps corner IF'ers.
• SS trumps any IF'er (all this really adds to the pecking order is letting the SS overrule 2B). If the SS hollers something, the other IF'ers shut up and do what he says. Like the CF, it's part of the SS's job to make sure there's no confusion.
• Any IF'er trumps the C (because IF'ers have real gloves).
• But the C can overrule the holler of all IF'ers when he tells the IF'ers who should catch it (because he can see what's happening better while everybody else is looking straight up). IIRC, this mainly happened when goofy little kids weren't listening to the SS, and as C I'd yell at them to get out of his way.
• In theory, anybody trumps the P, but not in LL because the P was usually the best guy on your team, so you deferred to him. As long as he caught it, the coaches didn't seem to care ;-)

This was not some coach-specific scheme, it was how everybody was supposed to do it. It was one of those "everybody knows this" kind of things. No matter what happened, there shouldn't be any doubt about who gets yelled at for a screw up. I had LL coaches who were good at yelling at the right guy. Most of them were also good at explaining why they were yelling at whoever it was.

By the time you were 13, they pretty much expected you to know this already. About then, they'd do less explaining and start sitting you down for being a moron who was hurting the team. But they'd let you play in the next game. There was no formal code about this, it's just what they did. I was mostly a C, but one time when I was 14 I was playing 3B and I made a really good over-the-shoulder catch running away from the plate down the foul line. The SS had called me off, but I caught it anyway, and I was all proud of myself. But the coach called time right then, and gathered the whole team around, and asked everybody what thing I had just screwed up. People raised their hands, and the first guy he called on gave the right answer. At the time, I was both PO'd and embarrassed, but he had a point. He thought his job was teaching us to play baseball right. At least he didn't make me sit down. And he did say it was a good catch, that it was one of the hardest plays to make, which is why he wasn't making me sit down. But he also said that if I did it again, I was sitting down, no matter how good a catch it might be. Do LL-Dad coaches still do stuff like this? I have no idea.

You need rules like this, because when a play is happening, you can't have guys arguing about it or looking at each other to figure things out. You need some automatic pecking-order so that everybody but the guy at the top of the pecking order just gets the hell out of the way. If I was taught this by the time I was 10, how come MLB players don't seem to know what to do? It's not hard. So why does it happen? I have no explanation for it.

[Flip217]

That's a good one.

I think the most un-prettiest play I can think of is the one a few years ago where Aaron Rowand ran into the wall an broke his nose. Sometimes guys running into the wall can do it with grace. He just did it with a "splat".

The part that really got me about that was the fact that the Phillies had pads for that wall/fence, but hadn't installed them yet. Apparently the outfielders realized someone was going to get hurt slamming into it, and requested the pads. Of course, now Rowand will never have to buy a drink here in Philly -- he's a hero here, the polar opposite of Ricky "For who? For what?" Watters...