Specile Rules in Federation Games

[Umpire in Chief]

What special rules do any of your states or districts have?

Here there is one district which is exceptionally bad in baseball has adopted a 2 hour drop dead time limit for their JV games. Believe me this is such a beautiful thing, at 2:01 you could be contemplating suicide.

[frankscall]

Exactly where is "here". I've felt for a long time some type of time limit should be placed on all but varsity games, bth baseball and softball. This should be something the FED should be looking into.

[StoneyK]

We have a few very bad teams here locally and a fellow umpire (who was previously a head coach winning the state title his final year) convinced the opposing coaches that if 1 team got up by 10 or more early (1st or 2nd inning) they would revert to 3 runs or 3 outs per inning in order to get a full 5 innings in a reasonable amount of time. That said, if this happens would this still count as a legitimate game. I say yes that 5 innings is a complete game. HOW you got there is ok as long as both managers agree. What says the board.

[blue bomber]

Sounds a little Busch League, but so do the players, so I'm not totally against it. We have a 15 after 3 rule that takes away having to fudge other expediency rules in. The next region over to our west has a rule where sub-varsity can't start an inning after 9pm. We don't. A lot of guys that call rec ball talk about how parents yell about taking it away from thie kids, and I don't really know what that means, but it seems like that's the case with this rule. Granted, my desire to stand on the field for a three hour JV game isn't so high, but theirs probably is if it is a close game. C'est la vie. We do have the 10 run rule after 4.5/5. What's worst is when the visiting team achieves its 10 run lead in the top of the 7th.

[strike3scott]

In my area we have a district that has adopted the 2 hour time limit for J contests. No new inning after 2 hours though...not exactly drop dead but good enough. One of our other districts has adopted a 12 run rule for softball instead of the 15. That has worked well as there are alot of coaches that get up by 12-13 and pull starters to get playing time for the bench. We can't get the 15 and go on for what seems like forever.Some of your ideas sound good (stoney) but the game is still about getting outs. I believe an across the board overhaul of some rules is in order but BB & SB were never meant to be played by the clock.

Just like Casey Stengell said (and I paraphrase)

Can anybody play this game anymore? lol