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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. 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 passed ball may be scored when a runner on first, second, or third base reaches the next base on a bobble or missed catch, or when the batter-runner reaches first base on an uncaught strike three (see also the definition of Strikeout).

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 ordinarily caught by the catcher, but are not, are ruled passed balls, while pitches that get by the catcher that are thought to have required extraordinary effort by the catcher in order to stop them are wild pitches.

A scored run due to a passed ball is not recorded as an earned run.

A passed ball is not recorded as an error.

There tends to be a higher incidence of passed balls when a knuckleballer is pitching. The physics that make a knuckleball so difficult to hit make it equally difficult 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 difficult to catch.

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