Umpire-Empire:
Long time lurker, first time poster.
This spring will mark my 12th year of umpiring, however about a year ago I realized my 10+ years of umpiring has amounted to very little "good" experience. Basically my experience has amounted to, as a friend put it, "1 year of experience repeated 10 times." Starting as a teen who played baseball his whole life I assumed I could coast off what I knew about the game from my playing experience rather than put any real effort into it. This attitude not only resulted in making the same mistakes over and over (what is it that Einstein said the definition of insanity is?) but also working the same quality of games year after year.
This past year I started to work with an umpire who recently got back into the game a couple years back, Thunderheads, you may have heard of him - he is a pretty consistent contributor on all the forums here. Seeing how enthusiastic he was about umpiring made me start to take it more seriously. Having someone tell me when I was making mistakes and how to correct those mistakes really helped me improve more in one year than I did the past 10+ years, not to mention enthusiasm is contagious and makes it more fun for everyone involved (being a law school student also helps you realize there are worse things in life than getting paid to be outside and involved in the game of baseball).
Like everyone on this forum, I've already learned so much from the discussions and now I hope to start participating in them. This forum is rare in the fact that people are actually respectful of one another. Looking forward to contributing and getting some questions answered. That's my intro, happy to be involved.
-humpire
