Kyle Tucker, of the Chicago Cubs, reaches base on interference from catcher Yohel Pozo, of the St. Louis Cardinals. For more examples of catcher interference, click here, but be warned that much of the editing on these clips is pretty tight, such that you generally don't see clear replays showing the interference itself.

The Catcher Interferes

The pitch comes in. The batter swings—and for a second, things seem fairly normal. Except, all of a sudden, the catcher is reacting to something, and the umpire is coming out from behind the catcher, pointing rather forcibly at home plate, and then the batter is walking to first base. What just happened?

What happened is “catcher interference”. This particular flavor of interference occurs when the catcher impedes the batter’s ability to hit a pitch, and usually that means that the catcher managed to get their mitt between the bat and the ball, and so the batter hit said mitt either before, or instead of, the ball. We'll get to the penalty for the catcher's oopsie in a second.

This type of play is on the rare side, but when looking at baseball from a more zoomed-out view, catcher interference calls have been on the rise in recent years, thanks to a bit of a perfect storm-type situation: catchers are encouraged to catch balls as far out in front as they can, to help with their pitch framing¹, while batters are standing as far back in the batter’s box as they are allowed to do, to help give them just that little bit more time to react to pitches. With batter and catcher gravitating towards one another, you get more instances of the two coming into contact².

One interesting wrinkle to catcher interference calls: the ball does not immediately go dead if/when an umpire spots interference³. Instead, the umpire lets the pitch play out; in the unlikely event that the batter puts the ball into play, and gets a positive result out of it, then that play stands. Otherwise, the umpire does all the gesticulating and pointing described earlier, and the batter gets to take first base. If catcher interference is called, the batter is not credited with an at-bat, though they are credited with a plate appearance.