There are certain eternal truths in baseball. Third out ends the inning, third strike is an out, and third time is a charm. After rain spoiled my debut in the Rookie League/First Division on Sunday and Wednesday, the skies remained clear tonight and I got to work my first Rookie League game. And a charm it was, even if I do say so myself. I had half a dozen or so close calls on the bases, but I was in the right position each time to see the play and make the right decision. My calls were loud and clear, and only resulted in some minor chirping, if that. Given how close some of the plays were, I’ll take that as a good sign that I came across looking as if I knew what I was doing.

In one of the early innings, I made a call at third base that got the base coach going a bit—but it turned out to be a very short discussion. With one out and a runner on third, the batter hit a hot shot right at the third baseman. He caught it on the fly for the second out, than dove to tag the bag to double up the runner. The coach immediately started yelling that the fielder had only tagged the base, and not the runner. He was right about that, but of course it didn’t matter. Runners have to return to their base when a batted ball is caught, and they’re out if the base is tagged before they return. A gentle reminder that this was a catch was all it took for the coach to quickly retreat to his dugout.

Wednesday’s game has been rescheduled for next week and I’m still assigned to work the bases. Let’s see if my First Division debut goes as smoothly as today’s game.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 23:06 and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.