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Some general comments on this overall thread.
The premise of the original post in this thread seems to be something along the lines of "I never understood why so many of you guys stereotype Little League umpires as clueless nimrods until I worked with this guy yesterday, yada yada yada, and now I understand..."
As my 9th grade English teacher Mrs. Byrd taught me so many years ago, stereotyping is a lazy man's way to forming an opinion on just about anything and everything. Are there nimrod Little League umpires? Yes, of course there are, for a whole host of logical reasons. But the truth is, and we see evidence of this ALL THE TIME, there are nimrod umpires working at every level - the "hobos" Kyle mentioned working high school ball (that was a great post, Kyle), the the NCAA D1 umpires who botched a simple batter interference call on live national TV the other day, and the list goes on and on.
As a participant and observer of the Little League program on both a macro and micro level for about 15 years now, my observation is that Little League has made and continues to make reasonable progress in improving its program in a number of areas, most notably with rule changes that in general are "mainstreaming" it to be more consistent with "real baseball" rules, and secondly with respect to its umpire development program. Simply comparing the quality of umpiring in the televised games - regional championships and LLWS games - over the last 8 years or so since they've been televised, shows a clear and significant improvement in the quality of the umpiring.
Little League is unique among national youth baseball programs in the establishment of formal umpire training programs in each of its 8 U.S. regions. Many of them aren't perfect (and in my experience some of them are next to worthless, so far) but at least it's a start, and it's more of a start than any other youth program.
Anyone who knows me knows I am frequently an outspoken and politically-incorrect, overly-blunt critic of some of Little League's decisions and overall operation. When I criticize it, though, I stick to SPECIFICS and name names, rather than painting everybody in the LL hierarchy with a broad, general brush of incompetence.
The stereotyping and general bashing of "LL umpires" in this thread reminds me of the Saturday Night Live character the Church Lady, doing her little Superior Dance.
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