DirtyDawg

I think an umpire gets 100% of the calls right to his or her knowledge and ability. As for replay, I'm not a big fan. I think the perfection of baseball is the fact the game isn't perfect at all. To me the replay is a slipping slope. We start off using it for home runs and before you know it we will have to pause the game after every close pitch to see whether or not it was a strike. Games will go from 2.5 hours to 5 hours, fans will get bored with the game, and then the game that I love and stive to keep its integrity into it will be no more.

I agree. In a case where the play is looking to be close in the outfield, it is the base umpire's job to turn his back to you and go out. You would then in turn take the bases in a one man system watching the tag ups. I have also noticed that a lot of the responses end with an ejection. As an umpire all of my coaches know how hard headed I am. I stick to any call I make (hell I had a ball hit foul, hit the bag, and roll foul again last night. I had already made my mind up to call it foul, and even though I knew as soon as I made my call it was fair, I stuck with it). They all realize this and I'll let them come up and make their point, but they realize that it's not going to help the situation any and it's because of this I can say that I have yet to have an ejection. Another reason is because in all of the leagues I do there is a lot of paperwork involved after the ejection, and I am lazy and really don't feel like doing homework on top of my homework from school. I have two extremely hard classes right now and don't have time for more. I do understand that my umpiring career is still very young, and I'm no where near seeing everything as well as having to handle extremely intense situations. I'm sure my list of ejections will definately start somewhere, but until that day I play on handling each and every situation as calmly and as professionally as I can. I am actually taking a class right now and in it I was taught this new method to handling intense situations. It is called the side step method. How this method works is it takes the confrontation down a level by allowing the umpire to stay at the coaches side rather than to be locked nose to nose in a combatative position. Just a thought!

I might try the compression short thing once before I go into buying anything special.

I tell ya, an ejection of myself would have been a great thing that day. It was hot as hell, I was sick as hell, an all-in-all, this was a game from hell.

Alright, UIC, I'm gonna pray you're right on this one. It'd be nice to get to see one of the games in St. Louis this weekend at the old ball park.

Haha.....I wish I could have done that, but unfortunately the only coach I got along with on that level was the game before.

I have the Nohasatol disease (think about it and if you still don't understand it say it out loud very slowely) so the garters would essentially be my ultimate way to go. My only question is how well will these things work if I'm doing a little light running? Will they stay clipped?

That is what I wanted to know. Of course when it did happen to me the game was a complete blow out and the coach whose team it was against was a real hot head so my partner and I just said we'd put the girl back on third as to not cause any drama. This game wound up being the last game of the season anyways.

Hey, it's all good. If I had a longer shirt I would definitely use it. I noticed a short while back of a shirt that offered an extra 3-4 inches of tail, but was wondering if there was something else out there before I go and restock my entire umpiring wardrobe.

The original play happened under ASA fastpitch rules, but I wanted to get the rulings of any governing body of baseball/softball that this play could happen under. F1 pitches a ball which hits the dirt and slides underneath F2 and lands and stops underneath PU. PU scrambles to get out of the way, but in doing so accidentally kicks the ball away from F2 (F2 had no idea where the ball was yet as this was all bang/bang) allowing R1 to score from 3rd base. What would the following call be?

I don't know about umpiring in my sleep, but I think there was a couple of slow-pitch games I umpired while sleeping.

I am looking for something to help keep my shirt tail tucked in my pants while squatting behind the plate during games. I have used the hidden tailor flex belt before, but it broke within two weeks (the metal clasp that holds the belt together ripped off of the rubber). I was considering the ultimate belt. Has anyone used this before or found anything that will keep me from having to re-tuck in my shirt after every pitch?