Moore: “Today I got a penalty stroke for absolutely no reason."

Ryan Moore is three back at Quail Hollow even with a one-shot penalty that he mistakenly thought had been something addressed in this year's book when Rule 18 2-b was changed to exonerate a player whose ball moved due to an outside agency. Unfortunately, Moore remembered it as people had hoped to see the rule changed, not as it was changed.

Doug Ferguson explains:

“Today I got a penalty stroke for absolutely no reason,” Moore said. “I went to address my little tap-in and set into it and set my putter down behind it. Took my stroke back and the ball just settled a little bit. I thought that was the whole point of the ruling change from last year that Webb had incurred. But it turns out the ruling didn’t really change anything. It’s still a penalty, even though I had nothing to do with my ball settling into a lower spot.”

PGA Tour rules official Steve Rintoul said the ruling is simple. If a player addressed the ball and the ball moves, he was deemed to have forced it to move.

“The new exception to the rule that’s got everybody hung up is the exception refers to if a wind or an outside agency, like a bee or a fly on the green, had caused the ball to move, we can get him out of it if he’s virtually certain that he didn’t cause it,” Rintoul said. “But in this case, we’ve got no wind. We’ve got nothing else down there, and the decision specifically refers to gravity. If a ball moves because of gravity, that’s just part of the game.”