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Old Fri Jan 02, 2004, 05:24pm
KentuckyBlue KentuckyBlue is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 28
my most frustrating inning

...happened just this season. One team (NSA adult women slow-pitch) was up 32-2 in the third inning, and of course the 2 team was home so we had to continue. As teams will do sometimes when they are way ahead, they put in a pitcher they wanted to "train" for a relief role who wasn't yet ready to take the mound.

Very soon I was giving her "nose to toes, first to third" for a strike zone and she was still impossible. She couldn't throw one strike out of six. Even a sympathetic blue can't call a strike when the whole park sees him having to bail from position to keep from getting beaned, or the pitch bounces front of the plate.

I thought I was going to have to issue snow shovels and bass fiddles for the batters. Every now and then the team at bat would swat one (when they could reach up and get it) just to keep us all from going to sleep. Don't know why they wouldn't take her out. Between constant walks and the occasional base hit the home team mounted an almost-successful comeback -- final score 32-28. Numbing.

What made it worse was that the awful pitcher was the niece of my umpiring partner in another league, who was watching this game from behind the backstop as a player on the winning team, and incredibly was imploring me to cut her niece a break.
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"The only person who knows the location of the 'strike zone' is the 'umpire', and he refuses to reveal it...the umpire communicates solely by making ambiguous hand gestures and shouting something that sounds like 'HROOOOT!' which he refuses to explain." -- Dave Barry
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