AndyG

@Senor AzulAs convenient as that would be (since I live only about a mile from Ahorn Ballpark) I won't be assigned to work Bundesliga games involving the U's because I am also a member of the club (I still play on their lower level "Landesliga" team) myself. German team names can get pretty creative, I admit that. Besides the ones you mentioned we also have the likes of the Bochum Barflies, the Magdeburg Poor Pigs, the Hannover Hangover Bats, and my personal favorite, the Lippstadt Ochmoneks. We don't really have a lot of German translations for baseball terms, we mostly use the English ones. This is different for example in the Netherlands. They have Dutch terms for pretty much everything in "honkbal". Some of few German words we use interchangeably are "Schlagmann" for batter, "Schläger" for bat and "Handschuh" for glove, for example. And I appreciate your musical taste, I do like some of the artists you mentioned as well.

Thanks for the welcome everbody! @jonathantullosHaven't been umpiring in other countries yet, but would love to. The travel would be ok, too. The Netherlands, for example, where baseball is pretty big, are only about a 2 hour drive from where I live.

Hi everybody! New umpire on this forum here from Germany. I wonder how many from my part of the world around here. At least I didn't see any map markers. Officially licensend umpire for 20 years now, doing mostly adult/youth amateur level baseball (and softball for a few years, too). Germany, like all/most of Europe (as far as I know) is plain OBR. We don't get to call as many games as some of you guys here, though, because baseball here is almost exclusively played on weekends. But we do get paid. Found this place via Google. Great site! Tons of interesting stuff, great insight and advice on all things umpiring.