[Carl Childress]

Originally posted by His High Holiness

The FED tried this for more than a couple of years. It was over 10 years. You are right. Coaches and umpires hated it.

Anyway, Carl is taking a play out of my playbook. He is just trying to stir up s$$$.

Assignors hated this rule as well. Since it was different from OBR and NCAA, it inevidably caused problems when umpires failed to do their job in FED. Many FED umpires do not know FED rules very well and default into OBR. They learn the FED safety and participation rules and pretty much ignore the rest. For some reason, they all master the 10 run rule fairly quickly.

Peter

Peter: The FED abolished appeals in 1981 and reinstated them in 2002. So for 21 seasons they did it right.

Coaches hated the "no appeal" rule because now someone (the umpire) was "appealing" baserunning blunders. Kids were getting called out. So all of a sudden runners were stopping at third who would in earlier times have scored. It takes a step to touch the base, you see.

Added as an edit: My records show that in the last year I called under the FED "no appeal" rule (1996), I had one baserunning error. R1 missed third, and I called the sucker out!

My records show that since that time (2002-2004), I've called out three. (Two of those happened this past season, and the same coach made dead ball appeals.) But I've observed more than 30 errors that were not appealed. In the old days (pre-2002) all of those suckers would have been out.

Umpires hated it because it put the burden squarely on their shoulders. A coach at third knows when his runner missed the base. If the umpire is in charge of "appeals" and doesn't say anything, the coach knows one of two things: (1) the umpire didn't pay attention; or (2) the umpire doesn't have any guts.

But those aren't "baseball" reasons.

Rich Ives (the well-known rat of a coach who writes for me -- and well) gave a possible reason: "The game is more spread out. There are fewer officials. Things like fair/foul and catch/no catch are more important."

But Rich:

That doesn't hold true for this reason: If an umpire who is supposed to watch a runner touch second has responsibilities elsewhere (catch/no catch is more important), it doesn't matter whether the umpire skips the call because he didn't see the runner miss the base or because nobody appealed the infraction.

If you have to cover another play, you can't call the runner out, either on your appeal or any one else's.

The rule was abolished purely because of OBR umpires who hated the impurity of it: "My grandfather would have rolled over in his...."

You want more evidence? In 1985 FED decreed an immediate dead ball after a balk. Do you remember the screams and hollers of OBR umpires? "Good Lord, you're ruining the game. Tradition means nothing."

Amazing!

Why? Throughout the history of OBR baseball, the ball was immediately dead after a balk (just like FED) until 1956.

I'd already been umpiring for two years!

We amateurs screamed: "Why? It's so easy to administer now. Call time and advance the runners. But with this new rule: What do we do if there's a balk and a wild pitch and the runner from first is thrown out at third? Is he out? Does he return to second? Do we count the pitch if he's safe? Do we count the pitch if he's out?"

The "tradition" the FED was dropping had existed for exactly 20 seasons!

In fact, the FED was returning to the origins of our beloved game. THEY were the traditionalists, not those who griped about have to enforce an immediate dead ball on a balk.

Here's where I agree with Peter, and there's enough evidence in the posts on this Board to prove we're right: FED games are not, by and large, being called by FED umpires. "Hey," somebody says, "I don't care what Indianapolis says, in Illinois we'll do it our way." OR: "Hell, I never called that shoulder turn balk." OR: "I don't care if the batter steps out of the box after a pitch. Forget about the penalty."

So, when coaches finally understood that their umpires weren't going to enforce the rules as written, they just said, "Ok, let's ditch those ideas and make up the rules as we go along."

I have no respect for any umpire who takes money to work a FED game and yet won't call by their mandates.

It's dishonest!

[Edited by Carl Childress on Sep 9th, 2004 at 05:26 PM]