In baseball, a catcher is charged with a passed ball when he fails to hold or control a legally pitched ball which should have been held or controlled with ordinary effort, thereby permitting a runner or runners to advance or score. However, a runner who advances due to a passed ball is not credited with a stolen base unless he breaks before the pitch is delivered.

A closely related statistic is the wild pitch. As with many baseball statistics, whether a pitch that gets away from a catcher is a passed ball or wild pitch is at the discretion of the official scorer. Typically, pitches that are deemed to be ordinary to be caught by the catcher, but are not, are ruled passed balls, while pitches that get by the catcher that are thought to have needed unordinary effort by the catcher in order to stop, are wild pitches.

A run that scores because of a passed ball is not scored as an earned run.

A passed ball is not scored as an error.

There tends to be a higher incidence of passed balls when a knuckleballer is on the mound. The physics that make a knuckleball so hard to hit make it equally hard to catch. While teams with a knuckleballer on their pitching staff often employ a special "knuckleball catcher" who is equipped with a knuckleball mitt, similar to a first baseman's glove, it is still extremely hard to catch.

Baseball statistics

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