Foul Ball / Foul Tip

I have a pet peeve. Like you, I enjoy watching professional baseball on TV. But nothing irks me more than commentators who call a foul ball a foul tip. Joe Buck is the worst offender, but there are others. Any sharp foul ball that shoots straight back over the catcher's shoulder or off the umpire's mask or otherwise goes uncaught but sharp off the bat, these dingbats call it a foul tip. These are not foul tips, they're foul balls.

Foul balls and foul tips are two distinctly different things. One results in a dead ball, the other is a live ball. One can result in strike three, the other cannot. One of them, by definition, must be caught; the other, again by definition, must not be caught. Foul balls and foul tips could not be more different.

In this article we cover the following:

Let's talk about the foul tip first, because it's the most straightforward.