by Great Unwashed » Sun Mar 12, 2006 3:25 pm
You don't need an error on the play for there to be a rare play. I'll start from the beginning...
On every x play, there's a 20 sider thrown to determine if there's a hit and three 6 siders thrown to determine if there's an error. A result of 5 on those six siders always refers you to another chart, the rare play chart, and more dice are thrown to determine what it is. On that chart is a bunch of results like "batter misses bag while rounding first and is called out on appeal", and things like that. I can't remember many of them, but what I certainly remember is that it would very rarely affect anything, i.e. it usually involved the batter being out when he would have been out anyway. But occasionally there would be a play that would matter, and in your case it would have read something like "outfielder catches ball and tries to throw out advancing runner. Ball is thrown into opponents' dugout. All runners advance one base." So it wouldn't matter who's running or what the outfielder's arm was.
Every so often somebody posts an "impossible" result on the boards wondering what's up. This is the explanation.