If you’re a baseball fan of a certain age, you might remember those “You Make the Call” commercials. They were sponsored by IBM, they featured a musical soundtrack that blended bongo drums with zippy synth pop and they tested your intermediate to deep knowledge of the MLB Rulebook.
Have you ever tried reading baseball’s official rules? It’s a trip and a half. The entire thing is more than 190 pages and broken into nine sections. There are subsections and sub-subsections and official comments on the sub-subsections. The rules cover almost every conceivable circumstance that can happen on a major-league field. It’s updated (and gets thicker) every year. And it isn’t a breezy read, either. Even someone who aced the LSATs could be forgiven for stumbling over the legalese in baseball’s official rules.
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It’s a good reminder: the toughest part of a major-league umpire’s job might not be the foul tips or the bang-bang plays or the month of August in St. Louis or getting chirped at for three straight hours. The toughest part is memorizing every last codicil — and being ready to deploy that knowledge in instant.
Joe West might be the all-time record holder for umpiring the most major-league games, but only one umpire was known as “God” by players and coaches during his decades in blue. That would be Doug Harvey, who often introduced videos in the “You Make the Call” oeuvre. So in Harvey’s memory, here are 10 questions pulled from the rulebook to test your knowledge, plus one bonus question.
Can you make the right call?
Enjoy this? Find more quizzes on our MLB Trivia Tuesday homepage.
(Photo: Rich Schultz / Getty Images)
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