comes close enough to the base that he is able to touch it with some part of his body during the slide, the slide will be ruled to be legal. On the flip side, the fielder will often be granted the neighborhood play under such circumstances. Avoiding collision or injury from errant throw Particularly for younger players, proper sliding technique has been shown to protect the runner and fielder from colliding and can prevent the runner from being hit by an errant throw. For this reason, most youth baseball leagues now advise teaching proper sliding technique at a young age and urge kids to slide feet-first into any base (except first base) whenever there is a potentially close play. This concept is somewhat more controversial in adult amateur baseball/softball leagues since the risk of injury from sliding increases with age. Speed impact of sliding The television series MythBusters tested participants' baserunning speed with and without sliding, and found that in cases where the runner needs to stop on the base, sliding into that base instead of staying upright provided a split second of advantage, suggesting the more rapid deceleration as the key. However, when removing the need to stop, the general belief within baseball circles is that remaining upright and running all the way to the base at top speed allows a baserunner to reach the base faster than sliding. Consequently, on plays during which neither being tagged out nor being put in jeopardy by overrunning the base is at issue (e.g., when approaching first base after having batted the ball and nobody is trying to make a tag play), players are usually advised not to slide. Nonetheless, this conventional wisdom is not universally accepted, and as such, some players may feel that sliding will get them to the base more quickly and will thus choose to do so despite advice to the contrary. Risks associated with sliding One study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine followed seven softball and three baseball teams in Division I of the NCAA, and found the overall incidence of injuries sustained while sliding was 9.51 per 1000 slides. Softball players had about twice the incidence of sliding injuries as baseball players in the study. 11% (four out of 37) of the injuries caused the player to miss more than 7 days of participation. Because baseball shoes are spiked on the bottom, sliding with