Philadelphia Amateur Baseball League Rules

Competitive balance, enforced at the arm

The rule that defines this league is about pitching. Professionals cannot pitch in the PAB at all -- a professional being anyone who has played in a certified league or organisation, including minor league systems, camps and overseas spring or summer ball -- though professional position players may take the mound. The league says it researches new players itself to establish this. College pitchers, meaning anyone who threw at NCAA level, are capped collectively at six innings per team across the whole regular season, with no limit in the playoffs.

That single pair of rules is what stops a Sunday league in a city this size from becoming an exhibition for one club's ringers.

The rest is unusually thorough. Games run three and a half hours with a fifteen-minute grace period, and a tie is resumed the next time the two clubs meet. A pitcher comes out after four hit batsmen and immediately if the umpire judges intent. Mercy is twelve runs after seven innings, fifteen after six, seventeen after five in a seven-inning game. A runner must slide or surrender at the plate, and charging means an ejection and an out. Ejections carry a $50 fine and possible suspension. Breaking equipment that belongs to somebody else -- deliberately or through misuse -- means paying its full replacement cost to the owner before playing again.

A rulebook this dense is unusable as a wall of text. On a High Cheese league page the current version sits beside the schedule it governs, so a captain settling an argument at Edgley on a Sunday is reading the same paragraph as the commissioner.