BENNETT'S MINUTES: Contradictory IHSAA by-laws create baseball ruckus

Thursday, June 7, 2018

When Indianapolis Scecina scored two runs in the bottom of the seventh inning on Saturday night to win the Park Tudor Class 2A baseball regional title 7-6 over South Vermillion, everybody went home and thought the title had been decided.

That was hardly the case.

If you haven’t heard, Scecina pitcher Mac Ayres exceeded the single-day pitch limit — throwing 17 pitches in a semifinal win over Union County in the afternoon and then throwing 117 pitches against South Vermillion that night.

The one-day limit of pitches is 120, and Ayres exceeded that limit by 14 pitches.

Scecina “self-reported” the violation, and South Vermillion also notified the IHSAA after the game that Ayres had been overused according to its tally.

So what’s the penalty?

That depends on which IHSAA by-law you use.

Article 51-4-e states that a violation of the pitch count rule results in a forfeit of that game by the offending team.

Had that standard been used, South Vermillion could have been allowed to advance to Saturday’s semistate and play Southridge instead of Scecina. Or, the IHSAA could have ruled Scecina ineligible and allowed Southridge to advance directly to the state finals without a semistate opponent.

However, IHSAA by-law 3-9.4 has a different penalty for post-season play — in which any athlete in the position of being ineligible is suspended for the next level of competition, but the athlete’s team may continue to play.

The eventual ruling by the IHSAA, therefore, was that Ayres will not be able to play tomorrow in the semistate but the rest of the team will.

So if you’re following along, a player who had no idea how many pitches he had thrown is penalized because the coaches responsible for keeping track of that statistic did not do their job.

Unbelievable.

According to precedent, the IHSAA was actually consistent with this ruling.

Former Rockville principal Dave Mahurin sent me a note describing a similar situation during one of the first years the pitch-count rule existed.

The Rox were playing Frontier in a regional game, and their athletic director discovered the illegality during the game and approached the umpires about it.

The umpires told Rockville it was an IHSAA matter and they had no control over it. Rockville appealed after the game, and nothing was done.

The flaws with this entire system are numerous:

• The host team in a tournament game is apparently not required to have a pitch-counter in the press box, and the teams are supposed to confer during the game to keep each other in line on this rule.

As numerous online comments have pointed out, Little League has the same rule and at its games there is not only a section on the scoreboard to keep track of pitches, but the announcer informs everyone after each inning how many innings the current pitcher has thrown.

• These two by-laws repel each other like holding two magnets together.

One of our Putnam County teams had to forfeit a Western Indiana Conference crossover game this year to another county team after accidentally violating the rule. They admitted it, took their penalty and went on with their seasons.

The post-season is admittedly different, however, since there is a finite ending to each team’s season after a loss.

But do we not care as much about the well-being of a pitcher’s arm in the post-season as in the regular season?

Apparently we don’t.

Numerous online comments revolved around the idea that “why is there a rule if you’re not going to enforce it?”

Completely valid point.

South Vermillion was predictably not happy, and considered legal action over the situation. The SV lawyer told the school, however, that the IHSAA is free to interpret its own by-laws however it chooses and a lawsuit would be defeated.

• Issues of eligibility, concerning residency or academic status, understandably should take place after an event. Nobody has access to that information during the game.

But in a case like this where the information was available, there is no excuse for this to be brushed aside.

Hopefully these by-laws can be merged somehow, and a requirement can be installed for pitch counts to be announced at all games to prevent this from happening again.

The situation was just embarrassing. And avoidable.