Overview
A passed ball is charged when the official scorer determines the catcher should have handled a pitch with ordinary effort but failed to do so. Unlike a wild pitch, the catcher bears responsibility, and the resulting runs do not count as earned runs for the pitcher. Passed balls serve as one measure of a catcher's defensive ability; catchers with few passed balls over a season earn high regard as reliable backstops. With the rise of pitch framing, the ability to handle borderline pitches has gained even greater importance. In NPB, blocking technique for bounced breaking balls is considered an essential catcher skill, especially when paired with forkball specialists.
Passed Ball vs. Wild Pitch
The play most often confused with a passed ball is the wild pitch. Both involve a pitch getting behind the catcher and allowing a runner to advance, but responsibility falls in different places. The call is left to the official scorer, who separates the two by judging whether the pitch went astray because of the pitcher or because of the catcher.
| Item | Passed ball | Wild pitch |
|---|---|---|
| Responsibility | The catcher | The pitcher |
| When it is charged | The catcher fails to hold a pitch that ordinary fielding effort would have handled | The pitch is so far off target that the catcher could not have reached it with ordinary effort |
| Earned runs | Runs scoring because of a passed ball are not charged as earned runs to the pitcher | Treated as the pitcher's mistake and may be charged as an earned run |
Passed Ball vs. Koitsu
Koitsu is a general Japanese word for any play in which a fielder lets the ball get behind him, used for infielders and outfielders as well as catchers. A passed ball, by contrast, is an official scoring term charged only to catchers. In other words, among all the plays in which "the catcher let the pitch get past him," those the official scorer attributes to the catcher become passed balls in the record. The two words are also easy to mix up in Japanese: passed ball is hoitsu while koitsu is read kouitsu, and the characters are similar.
When a Passed Ball Is Charged: Rulings by Example
Letting the pitch get past is not enough on its own. Under Rule 9.13 of the Official Baseball Rules, a passed ball requires that a runner advance as a result. The typical rulings are as follows.
| Situation | Ruling |
|---|---|
| The catcher lets a pitch get past with no runners on (third strike excepted, so no advance occurs) | No passed ball is charged |
| A pitch that should have been handled gets past and the runner on first advances to second | Passed ball |
| A third strike gets past and the batter reaches first (the dropped third strike) | The batter is charged with a strikeout and the pitcher credited with one, and the catcher is charged with a passed ball |
| The runner was already stealing before the pitch and would have advanced regardless | Stolen base only (no passed ball) |
| The ball got past because of the pitch itself (a one-hopper, or a pitch well off target) | Wild pitch rather than passed ball |
Passed balls are not counted among a team's errors. Because the pitcher and catcher handle the ball far more often than any other fielder, mishandled pitches are recorded in a category of their own, separate from errors.
Passed Ball Records and Trends
The NPB single-season passed ball record is 17 in both leagues: Katsuya Nomura (Nankai, 1960) in the Pacific League and Yoshiharu Wakana (Hanshin, 1979) in the Central League. Nomura also holds the career mark since 1960 with 132, while in the Central League Motonobu Tanishige leads with 118. Both were outstanding catchers who appeared in an extraordinary number of games, so a large career total reflects the sheer number of games spent behind the mask as much as any tendency to make mistakes. At the team level, meanwhile, a season without a single passed ball is possible: Orix managed it in 2016 in the Pacific League and Hanshin in 2024 in the Central League. The more a pitcher and catcher rely on pitches that finish in the dirt, such as the forkball, the greater the risk, which is why blocking technique feeds directly into how a catcher is evaluated.