Learned from Peter Gammons that there's no definition of what constitutes a swing versus a check swing in either the major league baseball rule book or the umpires' manual. One would think that one of the announcers would have seen fit to mention this during the thousands of hours of baseball telecasts I've watched in my life...

The definition of a swinging strike is:

"is a legal pitch when so called by the umpire, which
(a) Is struck at by the batter and is missed;"

and "struck at" is not further defined... From an ordinary language perspective, I'd have to say that the vast majority check swings are strikes, i.e. the batter strikes at the ball even when he holds up...

While this leaves the call up to the ump's interpretation, the NFL rule book appears to be worse - the question came up of whether one could call a replay challenge after a pre-snap penalty has been called, e.g. there's a fumble, the other team recovers, rushes to the line, and false starts - can you challenge the fumble at this point? The rules governing replay are not in the official rule book (they are provisionally in place till 2003), but they don't even mention anything about the challenge having to take place before the next snap! So it's not even clear from the rules, despite announcers saying it all the time, that getting that next snap off precludes a challenge.

  ¶ 4:16 PM