The Devers Rule
On Rule 9.06(f), Joe DiMaggio's extra double, and the minutiae that makes baseball wonderful
Here’s another wonderful thing about baseball: It’s the best sport for getting worked up about minutiae that mean nothing to the vast majority of living beings on our planet. This is true about other countless things too, like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings and different varieties of apples, but it’s especially true about baseball, where 2,430 regular-season games are played every year — 40,000 or so hits, 40,000 or so strikeouts, five or six thousand home runs, nine hundred or so different pitchers, etc.*
*It didn’t seem possible to me that the “nine hundred different pitchers” stat was right, but, um, yeah, in 2025 EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-THREE different pitchers faced at least one batter. There will almost certainly be more this season.
John Updike wrote it best — “baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging out. Irrelevance — since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical — always threatens its interest.”
But here’s the thing for us fanatical baseball lovers: The game cannot be too remote or statistical to threaten our interest in the game. In baseball, the most insignificant things don’t just fill our minds; they consume us. We’re still furious that one MVP voter didn’t choose Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. We still feel a lump in our throats because umpire Jim Joyce called Jason Donald safe in the ninth inning of a meaningless June baseball game between Cleveland and Detroit many years ago. And so on.
All of which is to say that when Mike Schur texted the other day about his unadulterated fury — Mike can get worked up — about Rafael Devers not getting credit for a double and two RBI in the most unimportant game of the 2026 season, a windy and chilly July game between the awful California Angels and equally awful San Francisco Giants, he was not being even the slightest bit ironic or sarcastic.
And when we started fighting about it, neither one of us was feigning our outrage.
You can hear our first fight on the PosCast.
And, for way more than anyone could ever want on MLB Scoring Rule 9.06(f), you can follow me down the rabbit hole in the Clubhouse — a rabbit hole where we will pass Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Jim Sundberg, Tim Kurkjian and, somehow, Saint Augustine.