Talk:Sacrifice fly

Wording

This page previously read "advances on the play" rather than "scores on the play." In contrast to a sacrifice bunt, a sacrifice fly requires a runner to score, not merely advance. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 209.242.146.240 (talk)

Actually, at some point in baseball history, a sac fly was awarded for a non-scoring advance. Someone should research the dates. Maybe I'll do it. WHPratt (talk) 16:09, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

This article says, "However, a sacrifice fly still doesn't affect a player's on base percentage." Am I confused, or should that say "However, a sacrifice fly does (negatively) affect a player's on base percentage"? Archetypo (talk) 23:59, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Back in the deadball era, most players had a better chance of getting hits on ground balls, and so a player who tried to hit a fly ball to bring a runner home might truly be performing a sacrificial act, and the scoring rules chose to reward this by not counting the at-bat. However, with the livelier ball, more players were swinging for the fences and picking up sac flies as consolation prizes. This may explain why the rules have changed back and forth as to counting the RBI fly ball as a sacrifice or as just another out. Both arguments have their points. The developers of the newer “On Base Percentage” statistic chose the more conservative philosophy, where a sac fly counts as an out. So did the committee who defined “Hitting Streaks.” WHPratt (talk) 15:52, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

References

When 67.100.124.35 edited to divide into sections, it made it less clear that the source for the information on the application and scoring of the sacrifice fly is in the OBR. I think the unreferenced section tag is unnecessary if the sections are recombined. That is what I will be doing shortly.Justus R (talk) 21:08, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Three in one inning?

How is this even possible? If a sacrifice must result in an out, and doesn't count if there are already 2 outs, how can 3 possibly occur in the same inning for the same team? I'm sure there's some technicality I'm missing, but it would be nice to see that explained in the section where it says that this has indeed occurred 4 times in MLB. Only thing I can think of is if the catch errored, so the out wasn't counted, but it was still considered a sacrifice for some reason, but I thought the out was a required part of the definition of a sacrifice. Lurlock (talk) 07:40, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Wait, I think I get it now - It's possible to get multiple sacrifice flies from a single batted ball? I.e. With bases loaded, the batter could hit a ball and be caught out, but two or even all three of the on-base runners could score and have it count for a sacrifice fly? If that's true, I guess the theoretical maximum would be six, though I'd imagine this would be incredibly unlikely. (Or else if it did occur, it would probably depend on errors by the fielders, and thus be recorded differently.) It's not at all clear that this is the case from the article. I'd change it to indicate that this is a possibility, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting this correctly. Can someone who knows better confirm or deny this? Lurlock (talk) 04:45, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I see where you're heading. There have been rare cases where two runners (say from third and second) both scored on a sacrifice fly, due to an unusually long drive or some misadventure like the fielder falling down after the catch. But that's still one sac fly for the batter, though two runs batted in.

The answer to three or more in an inning is simple: most, but not all sac flies are outs. If the fielder drops what should be a sac fly and the batter reaches base safely, the batter can still be credited with an SF and an RBI. (This helps his batting average beyond the usual safe-on-error.) When you have one such error, there are still three other outs in the inning, two of which could be standard sac flies. WHPratt (talk) 17:44, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

Added: I think that in cases where a record seems to defy common sense (at least to someone less familiar with the game), a comment wouldn't be out of place, something like "(obviously, in these cases, at least one of the flies did not result in an out due to an error)". The same would apply to four strikeouts (already well explained), four assists in an inning by a fielder, three sacrifice hits by a team in an inning, two "caught stealing" in an inning on one player, very long saves, and so on. They're all cases where the scdoring rules try to protect individual credit and blame, where the playing rules are absolute. WHPratt (talk) 14:07, 15 November 2011 (UTC)