Major League Baseball: You’re the umpire. How well do you know the rules?

With the start of the new season, fans everywhere will begin to howl about umpiring calls they disagree with. But beyond making split-second judgment calls, major league umpires must know the rule book cold. See if you would know the rules in a variety of situations by taking this multiple-choice quiz.

9. True or false? A runner who overruns first base can be tagged out if he doesn’t immediately return to the base.

Julio Cortez/AP
The shadow of Atlanta Braves outfielder B.J. Upton, left, is seen as New York Mets catcher Travis d'Arnaud, right, and home plate umpire Sean Barber wait for a pitch during the fifth inning of a 2013 exhibition spring training baseball game in Port St. Lucie, Fla.

True

False

Javascript is disabled. Quiz scoring requires Javascript.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.