Installment 10: In baseball, the fourth out is a legal out.
Among the countless efficacy-of-prayer studies, the most provocative was published in the British Medical Journal in 2001. Leonard Leibovici, a professor at Tel Aviv University, had randomly assigned patients with bloodstream infections to one of two groups. One group would have volunteers praying remotely for them. The rest were assigned to a control group, which meant they got no prayers. The results: Those patients in the study who had been prayed for had shorter hospital stays and shorter duration of symptoms.
The twist, and what set the study apart, was that the prayers had been performed retroactively. The patients had been in the hospital about 10 years before the study. Some of them were already dead. If the intercessory prayers had “worked,” they had already worked, many years before they’d ever been prayed.
These results were not meant to be taken seriously. Leibovici was, apparently, making a point about the futility of using statistical means to study possibilities of vanishing unlikelihood. As one commentary put it,
“If … you have a prior probability of somewhere near 50 percent that thoughts can influence events in the past, then this study (if you believe it was reliably done) should, according to Bayes' Rule, cause you to update your probability to about 96 percent. If, like Leibovici, or most other people, you have a prior probability more like one in a trillion, then you should update to about 24 in a trillion.”
There’s no point “studying” possibilities that begin in the realm of the absurd. At the scale of inquiry that most observation can muster, they will remain in the realm of the absurd, no matter the results.
But, irony or not, Leibovici actually did the study, using rigorous scientific method. He didn’t make up the facts or fudge the data, and his paper is written in a sincere tone. It was published, it got serious replies from serious BMJ readers, and it has lived on as a emblematic paper for both religious skeptics (who see the point) and religious believers (who see the results).
I do not take the results seriously. Prayer studies are notoriously non-replicable. And despite being a praying person I wouldn’t say I do it because I expect intervention. Yet the premise of this study has changed my relationship to hoping otherwise. If it’s already nearly incomprehensible that a force outside the natural world would intercede in earthly affairs just because I ask, then how much more incomprehensible does time-is-all-an-illusion-anyway make it? (This time-shifting affect could also apply to other, non-prayer supernatural interventions that one might put faith in, such as “wearing your lucky shoes.”) Once some physics can break, then maybe all physics are breakable, and once we’re in the realm of the absurd it doesn’t really matter how deep into that realm. I have begun praying for people and situations that are long past. I’m amused at how comfortably these prayers come out of me. To be honest, much easier than the normal kind!
2a.
In 2006, a small number of Wikipedia editors were creating a huge amount of Wikipedia pages, rapidly filling up the universe of knowledge that the site would eventually comprise. The edit wars hadn’t broken out yet, and the standards for what constituted a worthy, well-cited article were pretty low. Basically, an editor with some knowledge of a topic would write what they knew, and Wikipedia’s article count would have clicked up by one.
Patrick Szalapski, in his mid-20s at the time, was one of these editors, and he had a specialty: Baseball and its rules.
He’d been a ball fan since his hometown Twins had won the World Series when he was 7. He was also an amateur umpire in his spare time, and for a while he had taken that calling quite seriously. He had studied the rule book, compared interpretations of rules with other umpires, gone to several umpiring clinics, and pondered pursuing a professional umpiring career before going into software development instead. His first baseball page as a Wikipedia editor was for “foul ball,” followed by “fair ball,” followed by scores more: baserunner, chin music, tag up, line drive, batting out of turn, box score, line score, balk, dead ball, catcher’s interference, baseball bat, Official MLB Rules. He created the page for Bill Klem, the game’s most accomplished umpire. (He also made a crucial contribution to the Wikipedia pages of Álex González and Alex Gonzalez: He’d added “not to be confused with…” disclaimers at the top of each player’s article.)
Anyway, it’s May 2006, and he’s trying to think of what else needs to be added to this online encyclopedia of everything. He remembers something from David Nemec’s The Rules of Baseball, an anecdotal history of various rules in the rule book, which happens to be Szalapski’s favorite baseball book. He creates a page for Fourth Out, a niche theoretical event which defies a lot of what we think we know about baseball, time, endings and so forth.
Here’s the premise and concept behind the fourth out:
Typically, if a runner scores before the third out of an inning is recorded on a tag, that run counts. Force outs, by contrast, preempt any “scoring” that happens during a play—e.g. a runner who crosses home plate doesn’t count as a run if the batter is subsequently thrown out at first base (a force out) for the third out.
But what about this scenario: Runners on second and third, two outs. Groundball to the shortstop. Runner from third races home and scores before the runner on second is tagged out for the third and final out of the inning. Run counts, inning ends. But say the batter stumbles, or gets hurt, or loafs, or simply quits running because he thinks the inning is over anyway. The fourth out rule states that the shortstop in this situation could throw to first, get the force out, and that force out would preempt both the previous third out and the run that had seemed to have scored. A force out can preempt everything, even the end of an inning.
So the defense could, in a ridiculous scenario that as far as anybody knows has never happened in professional baseball, undo a run that had definitely scored, after the inning was already over.
2b.
Another way to have a fourth out is the appeal-overriding-another-appeal scenario. This one has almost happened, which is why the words “fourth out” appear in the official rule book of Major League Baseball.
This takes us to Aug. 31, 1957. It’s an International League game between the Buffalo Bisons and the Montreal Royals. The Bisons trail 1-0 in the seventh inning, with runners on first (Ortiz) and second (Sullivan). Fly ball, deep, to the base of the scoreboard, 400 feet away. Runners take off, sure it will drop. Bobby Del Greco, “one of baseball’s finest defensive outfielders,” catches it “inches short of the scoreboard.” Both runners are a base and a half past where they started. The trail runner Ortiz, who’d been on first, stops and retreats. The lead runner Sullivan, who’d been on second, kept running, either because he didn’t realize the ball had been caught or because he had no hope of returning to second in time anyway. He, Sullivan, crosses home. After Sullivan crosses home, the defense gets the ball back into the infield and to first base—where the trail runner Ortiz gets doubled up for the third and final out of the inning. Much celebration by the defense. Inning over and, the defense believes, lead preserved.
The home plate umpire, Harry Schwarts, stands there, quietly, between innings. Schwarts has a great reputation as an ump. He is said to have a consistent strike zone and a good grasp of the rulebook. In 10 years he has ascended from sandlot leagues in the Cleveland suburbs to the upper-minors, with his wife, Della, entering the workforce to help support this passion. A few years after the events of this game, he will get promoted to the American League. A few years after that, he will get lung cancer. He won’t know at the time how serious the cancer is. He will die at 44.
But on Aug. 31, 1957, he is still only 37, still hale and healthy, and he knows something nobody else in the park knows. He keeps it like a secret. The teams switch sides, the Buffalo pitcher throws his warm-up pitches, Montreal sends up a batter, and the first pitch of the next inning is thrown. At which point Schwarts stands up, points at the scoreboard, and orders a run to be put up for Buffalo. According to the rules, he explains, Sullivan scored before the appeal had been completed at first base, so the run counts.
And, he further explains, he hadn’t been able to say anything, because if Montreal had subsequently appealed at second base they could have gotten Sullivan out, even after the appeal at first had apparently ended the inning. That whole time, a fourth out had been possible, and thus that whole time the run hadn’t been complete, and Schwarts couldn’t say anything without tipping Montreal off and influencing the play. Only when the next pitch of the game was thrown was Montreal’s right to appeal extinguished, making the run count.
What Schwarts had laid out, apparently for the first time, was the existence of the fourth out. This was hard for some people to get their head around, so the official rules of baseball, in the next edition, went ahead and made it explicit. What is now part of Rule 5.09(c):
Appeal plays may require an umpire to recognize an apparent "fourth out." If the third out is made during a play in which an appeal is sustained on another runner, the appeal play decision takes precedence in determining the out. If there is more than one appeal during a play that ends a half-inning, the defense may elect to take the out that gives it the advantage. For the purpose of this rule, the defensive team has "left the field" when the pitcher and all infielders have left fair territory on their way to the bench of clubhouse.
The fourth out to overrule a third out has never happened in a major league game. How a single comment in baseball’s rulebook, never applied in 150 years of major-league play, merits a Wikipedia page, by the site’s standards, is a complete mystery to me. But thank goodness it does. The absurd, time-bending, totally logical but also logic-defying existence of the fourth out is, to me, the perfect encapsulation of something that happens in the typical baseball-addled brain several times each season.
3.
There’s a long literature of what happens to our brains when death is imminent. There is some evidence that what happens is not panic but peace, euphoria instead of agony. There are brain scans that have been interpreted as evidence that the final moments are spent in a period of reflection and remembrance.
Please, let it be. But does that sound like you? When you imagine yourself facing certain death, are you calm and reflective, or….?
In Man’s Search For Meaning, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl gives another description of what happens when death is imminent: “In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.”
That sounds like me. The delusion of reprieve. At my end, I expect I will be looking for some evidence that the story is about to turn in my favor. I expect that, depending how long my dying takes, it will be a series of frustrations as each potential reprieve is undermined by reality.
In the far more banal experiences of watching my sports team lose, there is always a moment, a flash of disbelief, during which I scan the possibilities for a miraculous reprieve: Is there an umpire somewhere running and waving his arms that something was done illegally? Had a balk been called before the pitch, or had the batter nicked the catcher’s glove for a catcher’s interference, or had some fan or natural object obstructed play in some way? Had time out been called? This delusion might last as short as a thousandth of a second, just long enough for the disbelieving brain to say “Wait.”
As a kid, one line in the rulebook (contained within Rule 5.09) gave me hope after dozens of Giants losses:
In establishing the validity of the catch, the fielder shall hold the ball long enough to prove that he has complete control of the ball and that his release of the ball is voluntary and intentional.
The second half of that requirement seemed, to me, to make it clear that it wasn’t enough to catch the ball; the full act involves a controlled release of it. Which meant, to me, to 12-year-old me, whose team had just lost on a fly out to end a game, that a caught third out wasn’t official until the fielder took the ball out of his glove. I would watch opposing outfielders jog in to celebrate with their teammates. If they hadn’t taken the ball out of their glove yet, I’d root for them to for them to, say, stumble and drop the ball, involuntarily and unintentionally, in which case (I hoped) the validity of the catch wouldn’t have been established. I might have even yelled at baserunners in such situations to stay on the field.
I might have been the only fan who interpreted that rule that way. But this feeling of illogical hope, in the immediate face of conclusive defeat, I have found to be quite common, even at the highest levels of the sport.
4a.
There are two plays could be fairly argued to be the most famous play in baseball history. Both demonstrate the reprieve instinct.
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