DH and Switching Pitchers - we follow MLB rules

[FTMSupport]

Enough people have asked about issues surrounding DH that we decided to write up a post about it.

For the "DH", we followed the rules specified by Major League Baseball.. We understand that some youth leagues, high school leagues, softball leagues and others have different rules. In Softball, there is a rule called "DP/Flex" that essentially allows a "DH" for any position player. Some high schools have the same rule.

In the current release of iScore (v1.65 and prior), the "DH" only works as specified by MLB rules. What does this mean?

1. A DH can only bat for the Pitcher. This is rule 6.10 in the official MLB rules for anyone interested.

2. When you click the pitcher to make a change, it will list all the players currently not in the lineup. You can select from that list of players. This puts in a substitute pitcher, and leaves the DH intact.

3. If you want to change the DH, when the team with the DH is on offense, you click the batter icon, and you can then click the lineup position of the DH, and select a different player to be the DH.

4. You can NOT move a position player into the pitching spot and still retain the DH. The position player already has a spot in the lineup, so moving him to the pitching spot means you are forfeiting the use of the DH. If this is your intent, and you want to forfeit the use of the DH, then while on defense, you click the position player that will become pitcher, and set his position to pitcher. You will still see the DH as one of the players in the lineup. You will have to change that player to the missing position, and/or you can sub for that player as normal. From that point forward, there is no longer a DH.


NOTE: Do NOT try and use the lineup screen to make subsitutions... ever. The lineup is a listing of starting players and starting positions. Changing that does not perform a substitution - it is a replacement in the starting order.


In the release we are working on now (1.70), we are adding the rules for DP/Flex, and it will support all the variations used by High School, Youth baseball, etc.

Until then, DH follows MLB rules.

Hopefully this clears up some of the confusion with DH.

[raideroh]

Since touching the lineup after the game starts why not make it read only after play has begun - it seems like a logical place to make subs and it lets you - so I did it and really screwed up a game.

[FTMSupport]

There actually are some cases where you do want to change the original lineup. For example, you enter the lineup, but notice when a person comes to the plate that you actually put two batters in the wrong order. In this case, you are fixing the original lineup by changing the order of two players, not making a substitution, so lineup is the appropriate place to make the change.

Another similar situation that comes up in youth sports is one of the coaches gives a lineup that includes 12 batters, and they are expecting the 12th batter to show up before it is their turn to bat, so you enter all 12. When it comes time for that person to bat, they have not arrived, so you might want to remove the player from the lineup at that time. (Alternatively, you could use the option to skip the batter in this case).

You just have to be clear that lineup changes are to the original batting order/lineup, and substitutions are done using the substitution methods as documented in the videos.

NOTE: We have toyed with the idea of locking down the lineup after a batter has batted and not allowing changes, but it is possible that you could score an entire game with two players swapped, and not realize it until after the game (believe me, I have personally done it for opposing teams... or at least I have not realized until the batter's second time at the plate).

Thank you for the suggestion.