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Thanks to all the replies. It all helps. I'm sure it's a bad stretch that will improve. (Doesn't mean I can see the end of the college road not fay ahead. Special thanks to those who have said I've made a difference in their umpiring career. That's the best compliment I can ever receive. ❤️

Imagine how ABS could help a knuckleballer if ABS actually called a whole zone and not a 2D plane.

The bench jockeying nonsense - where teams are more concerned with dissing the other team than just cheering - is filtering our way. They think they can laugh after calls, chirp us etc. The problem with baseball is we have limited tools. There isn’t a penalty box, a flag to throw, or a technical foul to assess. Those are easy things to toss out there. Immediately hurts the team and/or player. Gets everyone’s attention. In baseball…you can remove them from the game. Nothing else matters. If I don’t remove you from the game, you’re going to hear back from me. No, I’m not ignoring it. I can’t believe the number of players that will chirp at umpires. And if the coach is a moron, going to him isn’t going to help anything. I wish we had something else. Removal for periods of time. You’re next at bat is an out or forfeited. Your team loses an out or the other team gets a runner. I don’t know. But we need something.

I’m going to join the skull cap wearing crew.

Timing...such a great topic. The element of timing within the ball/strike-verse that I find so fascinating is...the consistency of an umpire's timing. To include my own of course. As last year wound to a close, I had some college guys tell me, "Your strike timing is great. Your ball call is too quick." And I started to hear this repeatedly so, I spent some time addressing it. Then one night it hit me... We are all trained to stay DOWN on our ball calls, call the pitch a ball...and then stand up to reset for the next pitch. And for a strike call we are all trained to come UP on our strike call, call the pitch a strike married to a mechanic...and then reset for the next pitch. Ok, nothing revolutionary there...wait for it... In order to mirror our timing so the interval is the same whether ball or strike...we must make room in the sequence on the ball call FOR THE STANDING UP part of the strike call which we don't do on a ball call! When we SLOW DOWN the ball call, just a beat or two...that beat or two is the space filled between when we process the strike call and when we stand up. As soon as I added that beat or two to my ball call, it brought both calls beautifully together. If you were to close your eyes and just listen for the pop of the mitt, the pause and then the ball or strike call...you would hear little change to the timing of either call. ~Dawg

The 20-seconds between pitches... not between pitchers. The batter and pitcher have the same time limit... because of that it is unenforceable.

The timing rule between pitches... It is unenforceable as written.

No surprise given how many Seattleites and Californians that are moving your way (said by someone was/is from those places)

When a toaster looks like this, you talk to it.

Vanity, vanity... all is vanity. What difference does it really make? If the association you're auditioning for is a solely collegiate association (or, alternatively, led by collegiate umpires), I can venture an experienced guess why they perseverate on sartorial details like this. Insidiously, it's not someone who's 80 years old; oh no no, instead, it's someone younger... think mid-40s / 50s... What's absolutely maddening, is working for one particular association/assigner, who insists that we are to "look like the Big League guys", yet another association – often at the same or similar level of competition – insists, nay mandates, that we are not "Big League guys" and we will never wear that style of uniform (ie. shirts, shirt colors (ahem, Wisconsin just a few years ago), jackets, pants, etc.). Like that assigner / association head has a chip on his shoulder, or a grudge against the Big Leagues because he... oh... ohhhhhh... I get it. 😉 Again, if you provide the uniforms, then you have all the control and justification of directing what we wear. If ya don't... If you're too freakin' cheap or that much of a control freak over your little fiefdom...