Rules Guy: When replacing your ball from off the green, can you intentionally line it up?

The Rules of Golf are tricky! Thankfully, we’ve got the guru. Our Rules Guy knows the book front to back. Got a question? He’s got all the answers.

Player A and player B are both near, but not on, the putting surface. B is farther from the hole, but A’s ball is in his preferred path. B asks A to mark his ball. I know A can’t then clean his ball, but can he replace it with the aiming line on it aligned the way he wants or must he put it down oriented the way it was before? —Scott Puklich, Eden Prairie, Minn

The Rules of Golf can be, well, disorienting.

You’re right, Scott, the ball can’t be cleaned. The Rules for replacing don’t require the ball to be replaced in the same orientation, so a realignment using the line would be fine.

As an aside, though, the “spot” includes the ball’s vertical location relative to the ground, which can be an issue if there’s mud on the ball — you can’t essentially tee up the ball on a clump of mud attached to it unless it was already that way when you marked it, per Clarification 14.2c/1.

Rules

For more ball-replacement guidance from our guru, read on …

A player hits his drive in the fairway. When he addresses his ball for his second shot, his foot is in a deep divot left by a previous group. He sees a clump of turf a few yards ahead, retrieves it and places it in the divot, then plays his shot. By improving his stance, has he broken the rules? —John Alario, Staten Island, N.Y.

Cruelly, he has. Replacing divots is proper etiquette but doing so in this instance is breaking one of golf’s most fundamental rules, namely, playing the course as you find it.

Rule 8.1a prohibits improving any condition affecting the stroke — here, the area of intended stance — by certain actions, one of which being altering the ground surface by replacing a divot in a divot hole.

He gets our sympathy as well as the general penalty of two strokes in stroke play and loss of hole in match play.

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