ASA girls 14U fastpitch rules - Pitching

Question
QUESTION: This past summer I watched my daughter's team and the pitcher on her team did a couple things that seem illegal to me.  
 1)  She sometimes uses a sneaky pitch where she releases the ball after she swings her arm back then on the first forward motion she releases the ball and continues to rotate her arm around as if she was going to do a normal pitch.  That would be a full revolution after releasing the ball.  
2) She walked a batter on purpose by throwing her "change-up" which was really slow in fact it dropped to the ground 10 feet in front of the batter.  She did this four times in a row.  I can understand an umpire not calling it on the first one, or maybe even the second one, but by the third and forth, shouldn't the umpire call these illegal pitches?  In this case there were runners on 1st and 2nd.

Are these legal or illegal?  And what should happen after each one.   




ANSWER: Hi Doug,

#1 is illegal, you cannot make another full revolution after releasing the pitch.

#2 nothing illegal here, just a pitched ball hitting the ground, I guess what makes you think there's an IP here?

Mark

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: In #2 I believe according to Rule 6-3-N "The pitcher shall not deliberately drop, roll or bounce the ball in order to prevent the batter from hitting it."  that a pitcher cannot do this.  If it happens once I can see how it can be interpreted as a bad pitch, but when it happens four pitches in a row it seems like it would then be pretty obvious it is being done deliberately.  In this case the coach had a conference with the pitcher before the first pitch to the batter and everyone knows she is not that bad of a pitcher.

Answer
Hi Doug,

BTW the rule for #1 is 6-3-m and that is an IP.

I can understand why you might think that based just on a reading of the rule but that would not be an appropriate call here.

I thought you might want more than just my opinion to accept the answer so I ran my answer by a senior ASA umpire (the "Scoot"), one of the best in the west, who has devoted his life to FP, and he agrees...


the key word here is deliberate.  If they "bowl" the ball obviously that's a deliberate act to prevent the batter...but otherwise reading the mind of the pitcher to determine intent here is impossible, it could be just 4 bad pitches and that's what her coach is going to argue.  Plus they will argue if they want an IW why not just throw 4 way outside the sz and let the catcher catch the ball w/out taking the chance of a bad bounce etc. and the runners moving up.

The fact there was an offensive conference before the pitch as well as the overall known ability of the pitcher are irrelevant to the call.

IMO and obviously the PU of that game, she legally (all the proper mechanics) delivered a pitched ball that then simply hit the ground before reaching HP.  The ball remains live, the batter does have the option of swinging at it and the runners can advance at their own risk.  It's not an IP.

Mark