Nuances

I want to clear up a few things regarding an argument I had with a player this week at Sophie's. It was during the third match of the night and we were down 0-2. I had lost earlier, in the first match, and had been replaying scenarios in my head from my match and was pretty pissed at myself for some of my poor decisions. My apologies to everybody for the temper tantrum. But what I want to write about is infinitely more interesting than anything else I've got lined up for the blog this week, so here goes.

Basically we're dealing with a post-safety situation. Like I said, it wasn't my match, so the details of ball placement, table layout, etc. are a little sketchy. All I remember and took note of is where the opponent's two stripes were. I got out of my seat just to see what all was frozen. I saw that the 10 ball was frozen and that the 9 ball clearly was not. In hindsight, I should have announced this to both players. But doing so didn't really feel like any of my business, as it wasn't my match--I was simply curious. The opposing player lined up for a long kick shot into the 9 ball. But he missed the 9 entirely and the cue ball came rolling back up the table and rubbed off the 10. I said something like, "Shouldn't that be ball in hand?" Apparently, because I hadn't declared it frozen earlier, it was a mute point.

Here's what the APA rulebooks says about frozen balls:

"The ball-in-hand fouls are as follows: ...

c. Failure to hit a rail after contact. A rail must be hit by either the cue ball or any other ball after the cue ball and the object ball contact ... A sentence that should answer many questions is: ANY ball must go to a rail AFTER LEGAL contact. [capital letters not mine]

d. The object ball is frozen to a rail and the player is contemplating playing a safety. In order for the following frozen ball rule to be in effect, the opponent must declare that the ball is frozen and the player should verify. Once it is agreed that the ball is frozen, then the player must either drive the object ball to another rail (of course, it could hit another ball, which in turn hits a rail), or drive the cue ball to the rail after it touches the object ball. If the latter method of safety is chosen then the player should take care that he quite obviously strikes the object ball first. If the cue ball strikes the rail first or appears to hit both the rail and ball simultaneously, then it would be a foul unless either the cue ball or object ball went to some other rail."

Reading the wording of that rule bores me to death. And it gets murky, especially in the case of this shot, when one tries to define the term "object ball." Intended object ball or incidental/accidental object ball? Long story short, I got into it with this player, self-righteously calling myself the only one in the room who was "hyperobservant" enough to check beforehand. He admitted that he was going for the unfrozen 9 ball, but he kept countering my argument by saying that my lack of audibly declaring the 10 ball as frozen was a negation of any right to claim ball in hand. Whatever, it's probably one of those "you had to be there moments." At any rate, we lost that night 1-4. So one lousy ball in hand dispute probably doesn't sound like it would have made any difference. But it would have. This match I'm describing was close, it went hill-hill. In fact, each of the first three matches we played that night all went hill-hill. And during my own match, I begrudgingly gave up a ball in hand, against my instincts, when nobody came to my defense. It seems like the whole match hinged on these kinds of small, tiny nuances of the rules of the game.