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Arizona Baseball Gets a Brutal Reminder About New First Base Safety Bag on Tag-Out

College basbeall is utilizing a safety bag for the first time this season.

Josh Wilson

The safety base is new to college baseball this season
The safety base is new to college baseball this season / Screengrab / @WVUBaseball on X (formerly Twitter)

With a new season often comes new rules and regulations. For college baseball, the most important change is the implementation of the safety bag.

The safety bag, a popular part of the game at high school levels, is a second, colored bag directly to the right of first base. When a player is running through first base, they can step on the safety bag and be considered safe, preventing a need for the fielders and runner to occupy the same bag. It lowers the chances of scary and threatening collisions that have injured players over the years.

But after the run to first base, the safety bag essentially doesn't exist. And it looks like it's already taking some teams some time to get adjusted to that.

On a throw over to first base, an Arizona base runner dove back to first base in time. West Virginia's first baseman kept his tag applied to the runner as he got to his feet, pointing out to the first-base umpire that it looked like he had his foot on the safety bag and not the real bag as he got up.

The official agreed and called the Arizona runner out. It looked like the runner potentially may have had his toe on the official bag (while his midfoot rested on the safety bag), but debate aside, the on-field call will serve as a reminder to athletes across the nation that they should use the real bag once they've reached base just to be sure.

A tough scene for Arizona, who did end up winning the game anyway 6-4.

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Josh Wilson
JOSH WILSON

Josh Wilson is the news director of the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI in 2024, he worked for FanSided in a variety of roles, most recently as senior managing editor of the brand’s flagship site. He has also served as a general manager of Sportscasting, the sports arm of a start-up sports media company, where he oversaw the site’s editorial and business strategy. Wilson has a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from SUNY Cortland and a master’s in accountancy from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. He loves a good nonfiction book and enjoys learning and practicing Polish. Wilson lives in Chicago but was raised in upstate New York. He spent most of his life in the Northeast and briefly lived in Poland, where he ate an unhealthy amount of pastries for six months.

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