orangebird

Umpire shortage, bus driver shortage...I've got a perfect 2-for-1 business plan I'd like to try now

Are you a former/current Pac-12 umpire? Curious how that works when a conference kinda stops existing for a year.

Excited for the Field of Dreams sequel

Honestly being a MiLB umpire seems about 10x less stressful than being an SEC umpire for game management lol, I can't imagine your average Baysox game has the same amount of hostility as a Vandy/UT, Ole Miss/Miss St, etc game

Worked a softball game today! (Org 2 assigns us to both) Gameplay felt fine, didn't struggle too much with the zone from a different release point...however...we had a fun little time with local league-specific rules Game started with both teams having at least 8, but then one of teams was down to 7 after about an hour. So we had to figure out How to handle the lineup if the player filling in to field for the short-handed team comes up to bat What is the lineup rule for the short-handed team (theoretically the short-handed team has an advantage because the top of their order comes up quicker) Neither of those were on my handy-dandy index card of league-specific rules for balk/no balk, steal/no steal, etc so I basically let the coaches figure it out and tell me what they wanted because it's not like I'm violating the sanctity of OBR figuring out how to handle a 12-year-old going to soccer practice. I will try to make a note to ask if this could happen at future plate conferences just so I feel more prepared going forward, but I'm not gonna lose sleep not having an administrative league-specific rule already memorized

One Friday later with iffy weather and they've cancelled the day's games before 11 am, so I guess they are able to check the weather and be proactive sometimes lol

Cracking up that this genuinely might be the 4th time someone has posted about this scenario, we officially have an epidemic

One thing I've quickly realized is baseball kind of has a major design flaw where there are lines that are A. very specifically measured and defined B. pretty likely to have any proof of their existence vanish into thin air after about the 3rd inning

It was in the pool

They said they're making up the games, so I'd guess their budget doesn't include that much room to double pay people and I'm a bit forgiving there. However...it was raining for a good 30 minutes before first pitch where I think you could've figured it out the fields were gonna be mud earlier than 5 minutes before first pitch.

Just reached out, league policy is you need to work at least one pitch to get paid

I will tomorrow, just wanted to get an idea of if it was reasonable expectation before I asked

Yeah I'm afraid to report I don't think there's any sort of document outlining the procedure there and I just did control+F for "umpire" in the league rules just to double check

Yeah it was raining the whole ride down so it's not like it caught them by surprise the fields would be a bit muddy at first pitch