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Please don't pretend that your are oblivious to the reaction of the players and crowd after you make a call. You know when you've done something wrong. You know how the demeanor of a player changes when he knows you are wrong. We are not talking competitive juices here...we are talking about making a call and knowing that you kicked it or not being sure, but still having to sell it.
As a specific example, lest there be confusion, I offer this: High school home team down by three and the bags are loaded in the seventh inning. Late afternoon and the sun is making it impossible to look into right center, sure enough the batter rockets one and my partner rules homerun on a clear ground rule double. the place went nuts when he made his signal. the visiting bench started pointing and objecting - the center fielder and right fielder were running in and the head coach is charging toward me at the dish. We had twenty people on the field! The fans were screaming - many for and some against. It just so happened that when I swept mt foot to clear the bat from the box, I got a great view and saw it bounce over. All of the runners touched and the head coach (the SOB saw it, too) was asking for the remaining baseballs. I informed him that it was going to be a double and his kids needed to get back on thrid and second. My partner was still already heading for the foul line and out the home team side for teh parking lot. (He would have been pulverized if the parking lot was on the other side.) I yelled for him to get over here and signalled "Time" and pointed for the runners to return. Sheepishly, the Home team coach asked "Did you get a real ggod look at it?" I just glared at him. My partner asked what was going on and I asked him if he saw the ball clear the fence on teh fly. He said, "No, but the player didn't put his hands up right away. Let's get out of here." I asked him if he couldn't here anyone yelling and he said - I'm not making this up - "My hearing aid isn't working well today." Stevie Wonder could have seen the kids jumping up and down and shouting about it bouncing over, but this guy figured that no one could have had a better view than he. He was wrong. The next batter jabbed one down the line for the winning runs to score, so the outcome was the same. I didn't big league him or rob him of his dignity. I did my job - without responding to the pleas of the players, coaches or fans.
I've worked some pretty big games and had my share of controversial calls. One thing always remains the same, you can't ignore the fact that our bad calls elicit far more noise than the close ones. I'm wise enough to know that my partners will always help and rely on me to help them, no matter how nasty the crowd gets. We've just been around long enough to know that some fans do know the difference!
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