Right now, as I speak, South Korea is in an unusual situation in the World Baseball Classic. It must defeat Australia, but it must do so by a specific score. The Koreans cannot score more than 7 runs, because if they do so, then the tiebreaker for a three-way tie may cause Taiwan to qualify for the quarterfinals and cause Korea to be eliminated.
What would happen if a Korean batter hit a home run (say, a two-run HR) that would cause his team to have 8 runs - only intending to hit a double or triple but accidentally hit too hard and it’s a home run - and then intentionally refused to step on home plate, thus capping his team at 7 runs? Would the umpire simply rule him out, or is there some rule that mandates that a home run automatically means the batter and everyone on base scores, like it or not?
My understanding is that the team on defense could appeal to the umpire, claiming it’s the equivalent of missing any other base. They’d have to throw the ball to the plate, and the catcher step on home.
But I vaguely remember a situation several years ago where someone hit a home run (for some reason, I’m thinking it was a walk-off home run, but the winning run was on base when the ball was hit, so the batter’s run would have been superfluous), and the batter - who was a single short of the cycle - only touched first, allowing both the win and the cycle.
I vaguely remember that, but I can’t give you specifics, and I have no idea how to begin trying to Google it for more information.
A similar situation happened in the 1999 NLCS with Robin Ventura and his “grand slam single.” Except it wasn’t intentional–at least not by him. Tied at 3-3, he hit it over the fences to win the game, but got mobbed by teammates in celebration between second and third, so never touched not only home, but neither third, nor second, so that was scored as single. To add to this, only the runner on third was deemed to have touched home, so the final score was 4-3.
Can you expand on the tiebreaking scenario? Looking up the rules I’m having trouble visualizing how scoring more runs would hurt.
eta One potentially pathological strategy is if two teams are playing and the winner would be in a 3-way tie. One of the tie-breakers is runs given up / innings played. So, if the two teams had given up a ton of runs previously they could deliberately go to many many scoreless extra innings to reduce that ratio. I find this tiebreaker odd vs using run difference.
To simplify let’s assume it’s not a walk-off hit so the situation @pulykamell mentioned doesn’t apply.
If the pitching team also doesn’t want the HR to score, then the easiest way is to intentionally miss a base and then have the defense make a live-ball appeal of a missed base. This does rely on the defense to play along.
The second way would be to abandon the base paths. Basically just round third and then head to the dugout. The umpire would declare the runner out once they leave the field of play.
The Ventura play you mentioned may be the one I referred to earlier, but it doesn’t align 100% with my foggy recollection. Absent any other info, I’m going to conclude that your memory is more accurate than mine.
But you are correct, there is no situation where it is better for Korea to score fewer runs. But it is true that a 7-2 win will get them through but not an 8-3 win.
What was amusing about this is that it screwed a bunch of bettors and helped a different bunch of bettors. The Over for that game was 8 or 9 and that changed who won.
According to this article from The Chosun Daily, they needed to win by at least 5 runs but could not allow more than 2. So, IIUIC, they did exactly what they needed to do to advance.
Note years ago MLB had a rule that a walk-off homer (not that they called it that back then) only gave as many bases to the batter as were needed to score the winning run. As a result Babe Ruth would have had 715 home runs under the current rule–and almost did when in the 60’s they toyed with retroactively applying the new rule, but “714” was carved into stone by then and they didn’t want to sully the Babe’s myth.
I could see that making sense – the game is over as soon as the first run scores. It’s like winning OT touchdowns in the NFL – they don’t do the extra point, because the game is already over. The other runners on base are like the extra point.