Peter's Perspectiv
I just wanted to reiterate what Peter stated in his post. It is always hard to tell exactly what has occurred at games when you get three different perspectives. Never has this been so true for me as it has this year. The Babe Ruth league my son moved to this year was lacking a(n?) UIC this year so I stepped up. The first part of the season (called our pre-season), we use all volunteer umpires. The real season we use the local association. It didn't seem to matter whether we were using volunteer or paid, I still have the same issues coming up in comments from parents, coaches, players AND umpires. AMAZING! The worst situation arose when, of course, I wasn't at that particular game. That evening, I got an earful from both teams' coaches about the plate umpire for that game. Apparently, both sides were unimpressed by his game management skills. So, being an umpire and having worked with these people, I know how they are. And, being an umpire and knowing how one can be exasperated at times, I knew how an umpire may possibly react. This is how I handled it (and it relates to how one might possibly handle an umpire that APPEARS to be an OOO, as in the indicator issue). I called the assignor for the association and told him first of all that I wasn't there, but it appears there was this issue (I won't get into it...too long already). I told him I don't know for sure how the umpire handled it as all information I have is second-hand and hearsay. However, in the future, if this issue arises again, here is how I would like to see it handled...and I gave him very specific instructions to provide the umpires that worked at our park (most of them familiar with proper proticol, which is the same for most, if not all baseball programs). I backed it up in writing with an e-mail and I made it very clear that I was neither implicating his umpire nor exonerating our people that were involved. I simply didn't know. This way, I could tell our board that I handled it, even though all I did was reiterate common proticol to the assignor, who knew most, if not all, of his umpires were aware of. If, indeed, this particular umpire was an OOO, then his association could handle it.
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