International Umpires Camp Day 4

[Umpire in Chief]

Day 4 was a partial day and started with a few hours of classroom work but it was pretty brief. We then headed to Southern Polytechnic for field drills.

I started with Brian Reilly and Steve Manders on the field we did some pretty in depth balk coverage. The vast majority I was pretty good with.

We then went to the dish to discuss plays at the plate. Overall there wasn't anything new or revealing to me here as I've developed the point-of-plate mechanic to lead you to the play which 90% of the time is 3BLX. But the perspective Brian & Steve put on it was really good. They talked about distance and angles in a new way which really reinforced my belief, but one new perspective Brian Reilly gave was being in the catcher's hip pocket. This will nearly always give you the best look at a play at the plate. because from here you will nearly always have daylight between the catcher and runner for an excellent look. And from the demonstrations they gave I can definitely see it's advantage.

After lunch it was back to the cages for plate work but this time we were doing check swings. My first cage session was with Paul Nauert. He was pretending to be a batter giving us all sorts of situations from being hit by a pitch, hitting the ball out of the box, check swings, bunt attempts, batter calling time, calling it late, batters and catchers asking for appeals of check swings almost any situation that can come up. It was a lot of fun.

Next I went to Jerry Crawford's cage. His drill was that Kenny Couch would be either be offering or pulling back on a pitch. The pitch itself was indifferent, but Jerry gave specific instructions to either call the pitches as "Ball! No he didn't!" or "Yes he did!" It was pretty funny to see some of the things guys came up with like, "Strike! No he didn't!" or "Ball, yes he did!" One guy had Jerry laughing his A$$ off. Another guy Jerry gave a quarter to and said, "Here just use this to call your pitches."

We had a great time.

After this we returned to the classroom had a final chat and received our certificates, shook hands and ended the camp.

This was an awesome experience. I'll write a summary tomorrow.

[willv28]

Great job Warren, glad to see you're having fun. We're just here playing in the snow...