The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated by David Nemec

Author:David Nemec
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683583240
Publisher: Sports Publishing
Published: 2020-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

In a game on May, 25, 2011, at San Francisco’s AT&T Park, Giants catcher Buster Posey sustained a broken left ankle and torn ligaments in a violent home-plate collision when the Florida Marlins’ Scott Cousins crashed into him while trying to score the go-ahead run in the 12th inning on a sacrifice fly. The force of the collision prevented Posey from handling the throw from right fielder Nate Schierholtz, which was on target. The injury truncated Posey’s season to just 45 games. Cousins defended his part in the collision, telling the San Francisco Chronicle it was the only way he could have scored what proved to be the winning run in Florida’s 7–6 triumph. “If I saw a clean lane to slide, that’s the play I’m making,” Cousins added. “I have speed and like to believe I’m going to beat the ball. But there was no chance on that play. It was a game-changing play in extra innings, and I had to play as hard as I could.”

The play was nonetheless reminiscent of Pete Rose’s horrendous crash into Cleveland catcher Ray Fosse during the 1970 All-Star Game that severely curtailed Fosse’s career. Cousins’s critics claimed that he could have avoided the collision by sliding to the third-base line side of the plate and brushing it with his hand. Posey also had his critics who contended he was blocking Cousins’s path to the plate before having the ball in his possession.

In the wake of the Posey-Cousins collision and others like it both before and after 2011, MLB, at long last, laggardly adopted new rules regarding plate collisions—but not until nearly three years later, scarcely in time for them to go into effect for the 2014 season. The rules implemented then, under Rule 7.13, are essentially the same as those in Rule 6.01 (i).

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