Forced out

Last week I read a short story by Xiaoye (小野). The story won the second annual literary award for short stories given by the United Daily News in 1977. The story unfolds during the last at-bat of a baseball game.

The title of the story is Fengsha (封殺). Fengsha is a baseball term, meaning a forced out. That's when a player on defense tags the base that a runner has to advance to. In Chinese, it also means to ban or prohibit someone from participating in some activity, so the title was picked for its literal and figurative meanings.

It turns out that there was a problem with the story's title. After the story was published, readers wrote in pointing out that the key play in the story was not actually a forced out, but was a tag out.

The author apologized for this mistake, but it is obvious that he couldn't fix things without making huge changes, so the inconsistency had to stay.

Readers also caught another small mistake. According to readers, in Taiwan's little league baseball rules, base runners can't leave base until the batter's ball has touched ground. This is different from the little league rules that I knew. In the league I played, runners could leave base as soon as the ball is hit (ignoring the case where a pop fly is caught). (In the big leagues, runners can, of course, leave base before the ball is hit.)

The story is posted on a bbs here.