A Splendid Saturday

I spent a good portion of Saturday (2/7) up at the high school baseball/softball complex.  Yes, I think with the current and future improvements to the softball field, it qualifies as a “complex”. 

Look around the area.  We’ve got great facilities.  The only thing close is Littlefield’s baseball field, and they pointed that sucker the wrong dang direction (oh wait, so did we…). 

I went up about 30 minutes before the baseball team was set to start their practice in order to help put up the outfield signs.  I didn’t know that the softball team was having scrimmages that day.  There was quite a good crowd up there.  We got the signs up on the baseball field, then I had some free time before the baseball team started their intersquad scrimmage about 2pm.

So I drifted over to the softball field and watched them scrimmage a little bit.  Man alive do they have a lot of girls out for softball!  Wow!  They looked like they were having fun and the field looks great with the new skinned infield.  As Scotty shared during a conversation, I too hate to see that much great grass go (especially since they apparently didn’t transplant it anywhere…), but I must also admit this is now a fine looking softball field.  Wonder how it will hold up for Little League machine pitch?  I bet it will be fine.

Shortly the baseball team did start up their scrimmage.  There are several new faces I don’t know yet.  The scrimmage was also an opportunity for local umpires to get in some work and to drill some new guys, so the pace of the scrimmage was not quite what Coach Eck wanted, but it was not bad.  They worked through several rotations.  Justin didn’t get an opportunity to pitch, but his back started to tighten up during some baserunning when he had to make some quick turns back to first, so maybe that was it.  It was probably a good idea he didn’t throw on this day.

Some of y’all need to sign up to be high school umpires.  Seriously.  The new guy they were breaking in was pretty sad.  Ask anyone who was out there; this is not just me.  It was sad.

When all was said and done I’d spent about four hours out at the complex.  What a gorgeous, wonderful day!  It was absolutely beautiful, and I got an early start on my perpetual spring sunburn……

MLB Instant Replay

Okay, starting the day they implement this garbage I’m officially less interested in MLB, just as I was with NFL.  Umpires (refs,etc) are part of the game.  You’re never going to take away all their decision making and you’re never going to get every call exactly right.  Live with it.

Players make mistakes, coaches make mistakes, umpires make mistakes.

I hope this turns into a fiasco of gigantic proportions.

A bunch of do-gooder, bleeding heart liberals run everything these days…

Umping a Practice Game

I called a practice game for a pair of teams that are playing in a 10U league this fall tonight.  The trick was, they are playing open bases and dropped third strike is live.  Leading off, pitching from the stretch, picking off, balks, the whole nine yards.  That’s a lot to throw at 10U, especially one of these teams which is heavily 9U and coming from machine pitch.

But you know what?  I think it’s going to work.  The kids were excited to try it.  They seemed to want the challenge of playing “real baseball”.  It was fun to call their game.

Being a practice game, we called a time out any time we wanted to so as to instruct players or go coach them on the field.  It was a good night.  I had fun, and enjoyed it even more than I thought I would.

I came away from it thinking our youth baseball is in some good hands going forward, and I wish both of these teams the best of luck this fall.

Umpiring Interpretations

We got a reminder how much impact umpiring interpretations can have on a ball game tonight in Idalou.  The Idalou pitcher, who was plenty good anyway, was getting strikes called extremely wide.  Wide like the catcher was diving out to his right to catch the ball.  Consistently this was called a strike for Idalou.  Their pitcher was getting through innings three up, three down on 12 or 13 pitches.

When asked why he was calling these pitches strikes, his statement was that our batters were “bailing backwards” and he’d been told by his distrct to call practically anything a strike when the batter did this.

Now I think the thing the district probably intended for him to do was call strikes on a batter that completely bails out of the box, afraid to make any attempt to put the ball in play.  You’ve seen the mythical kid we’re talking about here – the one that runs out of the box the moment the pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand.  This umpire’s interpretation, however, was that our batter’s actions were falling into this category even if they just straightened up and dropped a lead foot back – like many of our batters tend to do when they see the incoming pitch is no good and they have no intention of hitting it.

There is nothing in the rule book that supports this, and I don’t think there is justification for it in what you see some umpires do to help a kid who really is backing completely out of the box and encouraging them to stay in and try to hit the ball.  That interpretation is more a “gentleman’s agreement” that this is in the best interest of helping the kid get the confidence to stand in an swing – but there’s no rule like that in the book.  Our batters were not bailing out of the box.  There is a rule that says if a batter refuses to enter the batters box, the umpire is to instruct the pitcher to pitch the ball and every single pitch is a strike until the batter gets in the box.

In one of these two cases you have a child that is afraid, and many (not all) umpires will call a strike on every pitch as a way to help encourage the child to stand in there and try.  In the other case, you have an offense intentionally trying to delay the game (make time run out, run the game past 10pm, etc) – that’s an unsportsmanlike act that justifies the actions recommended in the rule book.

What our batters were doing was neither, and getting those extremely wide pitches all called strikes threw the competitive balance of the game completely out of whack.  It was an injustice.  The game was over 10-0 in just a little over an hour.

I don’t think the young man behind the plate was trying to pull a fast one or anything, just that he is so inexperienced that he grossly misinterpreted the situation here.  One of the first “unwritten rules” of umpiring is you don’t want your umpiring to favor one team over another and decide the game – let the kids decide it on the field.  The umpire tonight broke that unwritten rule.