6 Ways to first base?

Factual Questions
1

I’m watching a Happy Days replay last night, and Ritchie Cunningham was on a game show, answering baseball questions. He found out that the answers were being fed to the contestants and he was insulted…said ‘I don’t need the answers, I can get them myself…Why, I know 6 ways to first base without getting a hit!’ I’ve come up with 4. Anyone know the other 2?

  1. Walk
  2. Balk
  3. Hit by a pitch
  4. Dropped third strike
  5. ???
  6. ???
2

Actually, a balk doesn’t get the batter to first base, IIRC… it only advances all runners currently on base… thus the 6 methods are:

  1. Base on Balls (walk)
  2. Hit by pitch
  3. Dropped third strike
  4. Catcher interference
  5. Error (not counted as a hit)
  6. Fielder’s choice

Woo! Long time lurker, first time post wiggle

:smiley:

3

Cripes. After all the sex talk and TMI threads, who would have thunk that the OP was really about baseball?

How about overpitched/failure of catcher?

4

Base hit is the seventh.

5

How about being put in as a pinch runner?

6

note to self read op closely.

Make the seventh…pinch runner.

7

I don’t think the rules of baseball (as opposed to scoring rules) distinguish between hit, error and fielder’s choice. Here are the six as I understand it:

  1. hit, error, or fielder’s choice
  2. base on balls
  3. hit batsman
  4. dropped third strike
  5. catcher’s interference
  6. baserunner hit by batted ball
8

Since catcher’s interference is scored as an error (although a special category of error, because it does not count as a time at bat for the batter), one could argue that these two categories are redundant. The question often is posed as “five ways to get to first base without hitting the ball”, in which case catcher’s interference is a distinct category because it is the only type of error which can accomplish that feat.

9

The semantics of this can create all sorts of number because there are four separate ways a batter can reach first on a dropped third strike:

  1. Wild pitch (K + wp) - most common
  2. Passed ball (K + pb) - less common
  3. Throwing error by catcher (K + e2) - very rare
  4. Dropped throw from catcher by first baseman (K + 2-e3) - I suppose it’s happened
10

Hit and fielder’s choice are scored differently. FC does not increase the batter’s batting average, since if there had been no one on base he would have been out. All the ways of getting to 1st on a dropped 3rd strike are counted as the same thing, though.

11

i guess my opinion doesen’t really matter in this thread.

i thought you were talking about first base as in on a date with a girl.

sorry i couldn’t help ya out.

12

Cecil speaks: What are 5 ways to get to 1st without hitting the ball?

13

However, all the flavors of getting on base through a dropped third strike do show that you can reach first base on an error without hitting the ball and without the error necessarily being catcher’s interference.