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Originally posted by Carl Childress
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One great difficulty in jousting with Freix is his inability to get his facts straight. Childress references Animal Farm. Proved wrong, so Freix says I've altered my posts. Childress misquoted Osborne about "idiot umpires" and so held him up to ridicule. Proved wrong:
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Carl was privy to the following email that I sent to Jon Bible in an NCAA forum that the three of us participate in. I know that he has read it because he responded to it. Carl made the assertion on NCTalk that "someone" had called Jon Bible and his crew "idiot umpires". I sent the following in response:
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Jon;
I had originally ignored Carl's post (on NCTalk) because I felt that it was a deliberate attempt to get me involved in a flame war. Now that this has appeared in another forum and has been attributed to me, I felt that I needed to set the record straight.
As the result of a long back and forth discussion, Warren Willson was arguing that had you not sent the batter to first after U2 saw the HBP, the game would have been protestable. I was pointing out the absurdity of this
arguement and to demonstrate the absurdity, I posed a hypothetical situation that made the umpires out to be idiots. It was clear to me and to unbiased readers that I was not referring to you or your crew. One of those readers has even raised this exact issue with Mr Childress. The problem is that the forum in which this was raised has deleted the entire thread (and one or two other related threads) in which this issue came up. They said that they did this because the thread had become too heated with insults. Some of the particpants, however, feel it was because one of their top stars, Warren Willson, was taking a beating.
Whatever the reason, except for Carl, I know of no one who has access to the whole series of threads. Carl has released bits and pieces of the thread to try to prove his point on eumpire that I disparaged you. He has not released the whole thread. (He might not have it although he seems to have the pieces that he needs.) For the record, I want to state that you made the best of a bad situation and I am sure that you will work many more NCAA games. I would like to also say that I hope that I could have done as well as you did given the same situation.
Your situation in Texas was like the coming together of the planets. On eumpire, we had a heated discussion ranging over two weeks about whether or not certain calls could be changed. I was on the "get it right" side and when I heard of your game, I immediately posted the synopsis of it by Mark Land. Since the other side could not denigrate the god of NCAA umpiring, Jon Bible, they went through linguistic gymnastics to explain why your crew really did not "change" a call. (For the record, Carl did not materially particpate in most of these threads as I recall.)
Warren Willson had originally argued that, with rare excptions (checked swing, etc.) to change a call could result in a protestable situation. When faced with your crews play, he argued that to not change the call would be
protestable. Actually he argued that no call was changed, since the PU technically made "no call". As I said, it was linguistic gymnastics.
I look forward to seeing you umpire many more World Series.
Peter
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Carl has read the above post and yet he continues to say that Bfair has misrepresented what I said. I would like to set the record straight and point out that Bfair has ACCURATELY reflected what I said with regards to Jon Bible. It is Carl that is deliberately misrepresenting my position. It is deliberate and with malice because he has had access to the email that I sent to Jon Bible since early this morning 2/23/01. He responded within an hour of its posting so I know that he read it prior to his post disparaging Bfair's integrity.
In addition, several posters have attributed Animal Farm references to me. I have never read Animal Farm, am ignorant of the plot, and have never quoted it. It is easy to blame all the words that no one wants to claim on the man whose posts have all been deleted. (insert big smile here)
Peter