When you know the officials screwed up ...

That’s what I would have done.

 

Always loved those coaches who give batters sacrifices when they grounded out to move a runner up. Yes, he sacrificed himself. But there's no provision in the scoring rules for it, just sacrifice bunts and sacrifice flies.

 

I had the opposite happen. Kid was deep into a no-hitter, and have up asharply hit grounder toward second base. The second baseman made a try at the ball, but didn't get anywhere near it. It was clearly a hit. The official scorekeeper for the team gave an error to preserve the no-hitter. It was so bush league.

 

I kept a book when my son played high school baseball just to keep busy. My batting average for our second baseman - the coach's son - was about 150 points lower than what was in the postseason banquet program.

 

Our coach did the same thing, only it was a dribbler to left side of the mound. Our shortstop ran in like 30 feet and tried a bare hand pick and throw and missed it. The runner was probably 2-3 steps from first. Coach said it was an error.

 

Scoring is correctable. Live/dead ball is another animal.

 

HAHA.

I don't don't know what stat it is, but that's an important one in my book!

The sister stat to that is when your team is in the bottom of an inning and a couple runs away from losing via slaughter rule and it's 37 degrees and sleeting, so the pitcher "accidentally" walks in a couple runs to end the game.

My HS teammates and I may or may not have taken a pitcher or two for a postgame burger for doing such a thing. When you live in the Midwest, the only thing better than playing in a freezing cold game is losing it in 4 innings.

 

At one school I covered, the baseball score girl used to sit next to me in the bleachers. So, essentially, I was the official scorer. But, if there were any close-call decisions, I told her to ask the coach. He was a good guy who usually did the right thing. Get it right has always been a rule of thumb.

I remember taking a call from a high school baseball game. The girl said they got 17 stolen bases. What? I said, are you sure, that might be a state record. She said yes and that her coach confirmed. You know, a guy gets on first. He gets to second, third and home, those are stolen bases. Uh, no. We're not using that stat.

 

Sounds like a small school in our area that had four or five defensive linemen each year with double-digit sacks, even though they played in a district full of teams that rarely passed. Turns out that every time an option-running quarterback was stopped for a 1-or 2-yard loss, that was marked down by the coaches as a sack.

 

Two things come to mind. A tiny school called in a softball game once with 5 runs on 30 hits or something like that. Every time a batter got the bat on the ball, no matter what happened, it was a hit.

Another small school football stat had a runner nearing 2,000 yards for the season. Turns out, thanks to a call from an opposing coach, the statistician, like the example above, was giving yardage from the handoff point, not the line of scrimmage.