Is the "baseball choke" legal in Judo?

Question

Since at least 1999 judo has banned any chokes applied using the skirt of the jacket. This rule was re-emphasised in 2014 after a variant of suso-jime was used to success multiple times by Yarden Gerbi, and it is indeed this style of choke that is used in the example images in the current ruleset.¹

Is the baseball choke legal in judo? It does 'use' the skirt of the gi, in that tori grips it with both hands, but the actual pressure applied to the neck for the choke is done purely with the forearms as in sode-guruma-jime.

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Notes:

1. <sup>To apply shime-waza using either your own or your opponent’s belt or bottom of the jacket or using only the fingers.
   
   - IJF SOR 2019</sup>

2. ^{Example of choke in Katsuhiko Kashiwazaki's Fighting Judo (1985) under the name suso-jime (裾絞 "apron choke")}

3. ^{Note the term suso-jime seems to be an umbrella term describing a number of different chokes involving grabbing the bottom of the gi, including the "Gerbi choke" and variants of okuri-eri-jime with a low grip.}

Answer 1

Legal

My personal understanding (sorry, no official guidance) is this use of the skirt portion of the jacket is legal. This is basically the same use of the opponent's gi as in kata juji jime.

The rules are imprecisely written, which is very annoying. "Using only the fingers" would also seem to preclude ryote jime, but ryote jime is legal.

Using a belt or the bottom of the jacket as a garrote is illegal. This is how the gi was employed in the Gerbi Peruvian necktie variation.