No it won’t, for the reasons I’ve described above. The contact with the player that instigates an “intentionally dropped” call must be contact that would normally occur during the act of catching.
No it won’t, for the reasons I’ve described above. The contact with the player that instigates an “intentionally dropped” call must be contact that would normally occur during the act of catching.
You’ve quoted one part of Rule 5.09, but failed to read the opening portions of the same rule. It begins by defining a catch this way:
The rules don’t prohibit knocking down a line drive, they prohibit purposefully dropping a catchable ball (hence why the move is referred to as an intentionally dropped ball, not a knocked-down ball). The distinction is important, because fielders knock down line drives all the time, to keep a single from turning into…
The rules don’t prohibit knocking down a line drive, they prohibit purposefully dropping a catchable ball.
I don’t know if I could call this against the spirit of the Infield Fly Rule, since the rule specifically excludes line drives, which are inherently harder to field. This discrepancy in risk when fielding a fly ball verses a line drive is why the rule distinguishes between the two and only concerns itself with the fly…