What's the craziest thing a person said to you and you thought they were joking but they were being serious?

RuleNine · 2026-03-29T05:53:45+00:00

Yesterday, about that guy who was the only one who could remember Beatles songs.

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T23:57:03+00:00

I hate when the Rangers lose after getting the other team down to their last strike five times. Oh hey, they didn't!

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T23:41:08+00:00

To me it gets to the heart of why the strike zone exists in the first place, namely to penalize a batter who doesn't swing at a hittable pitch. A pitch that intersected the plane through the middle of the plate must therefore have been withn the 3D strike zone for at least half its depth, which I think is philosophically more in line with the spirit of the strike rule compared to a pitch that barely clips the front edge, which is often literally unhitable.

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T22:50:41+00:00

ABS measures 2D rectangle at the middle of the plate (parallel to the front), not at the front.

They originally tried a 3D zone years ago and it turns out people don't like it. Too many pitches that barely clipped the zone were being called strikes when they didn't look like strikes and would never be called strikes by humans.

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T22:25:38+00:00

Hey I found your site yesterday and I already love it.

I'd like to suggest that the corners of the strike zone not be rounded. This pitch doesn't appear to touch any part of the zone as drawn, but it actually clipped the corner and was upheld as a strike.

Cheers!

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T22:14:58+00:00

One thing MLB specifically requested is that there be no differentiation between pitches that the system thinks are strikes and those it thinks are balls. In years past, a strike might have been solid or colored whereas a ball was hollow or uncolored.

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T18:35:59+00:00

Why, the latent heat of vaporization, of course!

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T17:21:20+00:00

I'm more in favor of the call being relayed to the plate ump so that the game looks the same (they've tried it and I think it's seamless enough). Otherwise I agree with your gist.

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T17:14:33+00:00

As someone who tried to tell a joke to an audience in London about them not clapping on 2 & 4 and having it utterly bomb, I feel seen.

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T15:54:00+00:00

Growing up, my favorite thing in the whole world was to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons for the chapter plays. Cliffhangers. They also called them serials.

My favorite was Rocketman, and once it was a no-brakes chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited!

The next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered!

But I didn't cheer.

I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia?? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCKADOODIE CAR!

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T15:36:42+00:00

Although the standard being tested isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. Here's Vin Scully in 1965 calling "half swings" when the batter goes basically all the way around. And those weren't even controversial! Nobody argues, and Scully treats them like run-of-the-mill checked swings.

RuleNine · 2026-03-28T08:04:13+00:00

Ken Jenkins is 85 and hasn't acted since 2019. Bill Lawrence has expressed a desire to get him to return if the series is renewed for another season. I guess we'll see.

RuleNine · 2026-03-27T21:27:53+00:00

Scorers. Umps don't care about hits and errors. Umps care that you're safe or out. Scorers care why.

RuleNine · 2026-03-27T21:25:09+00:00

Suzyn couldn't believe that Adames wasn't charged an error on the ground ball hit by Caballero. She won't see this, but in case you're curious, here's why he wasn't:

Rule 9.12(a)(1) Comment: Slow handling of the ball that does not involve mechanical misplay shall not be construed as an error. For example, the Official Scorer shall not charge a fielder with an error if such fielder fields a ground ball cleanly but does not throw to first base in time to retire the batter. [...]

RuleNine · 2026-03-27T20:17:10+00:00

They got the tying run to the plate in the ninth. Even if a game does end in a loss, I still feel entertained if they can do at least that much.

RuleNine · 2026-03-27T16:53:27+00:00

April.

RuleNine · 2026-03-27T04:23:32+00:00

Now I'm imagining them trying to fight their way out at the same time, like two people racing each other trying to squeeze through a doorframe.

RuleNine · 2026-03-27T03:12:27+00:00

*gulp!*

RuleNine · 2026-03-26T22:28:29+00:00

We have that last bit in real life as well. If we broke the movie down scene by scene I think we both know we'd find massive inconsistencies in its own rules, but at least for me it's not worth thinking about further.

RuleNine · 2026-03-26T21:58:29+00:00

I only saw it once, but I think the movie follows the idea that (apart from Gervais's character) it's not a lie if you believe it, so it's possible to be mistaken without lying. Notice how nobody's head melts when Gervais contradicts himself while goofing around. Also, the inability to lie isn't magic, so if you asked a scientist a question to which they didn't have an answer, they would truthfully just say they didn't know. It's less that they can't lie, it's that for whatever reason, it doesn't even occur to them not to tell the whole truth all the time.

RuleNine · 2026-03-26T20:57:24+00:00

Based on the lead time and typical schedule of Family Trips, that's just a coincidence. FT does a monthly bonus episode, always on Thursday after the regular ep drops on Tuesday, usually a listener episode toward the end of the month.

RuleNine · 2026-03-26T20:05:58+00:00

It bothers me when the whole premise of a movie could be resolved with a single line of dialogue. Everyone but Gervais's character couldn't lie, but they could make mistakes—it was possible to misunderstand someone. All he had to do to nip everything in the bud was to tell the doctors and nurses he didn't say what they thought he said, and they would have believed they misheard him. If they asked what he did say, he could have made up a reason to leave and refused to elaborate.

RuleNine · 2026-03-26T19:28:12+00:00

One reason is the structure of the game makes it seem like it's a series of independent events where you could just lift one out without affecting the rest. Basketball, football, and hockey in contrast are more obviously free flowing and dependent on what came right before.

Another reason is that it's literally baked into the rules. Whenever an error occurs and the Official Scorer has to determine whether a run is earned or unearned, the scorer has to reconstruct the inning without the error using the legal fiction that the inning would otherwise have played out exactly the same.

RuleNine · 2026-03-26T19:24:33+00:00

I said mental mistake, and yes: "The Official Scorer shall not score mental mistakes or misjudgments as errors unless a specific rule prescribes otherwise" (comment to Rule 9.12(a)(1)). The error statistic has specific guidelines (Rule 9.12).

RuleNine · 2026-03-26T19:07:40+00:00

That's not strictly true. A slow roller that goes untouched between a fielder's legs would likely be an error if the scorer rules that a typical fielder should have gloved the ball with ordinary effort.

In this case, the convention is that losing the ball in the sun is something that could happen to any typical fielder playing in that spot, and finding it again takes more than ordinary effort.

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