[Rich]

Originally posted by dvellison
Actually, I am. I have coached baseball for about 25 years and have been an umpire for 17 years. Experienced, certified and trained. I don't comment based on personal likes and dislike. I'm talking about the rules and the honest interpretation of judgement calls based on facts, without regard to personal preference of teams or players.

As an umpire, we get most of the calls right. This does not include balls and strikes since that area has become completely judgemental with disredard for the rules. Our job is to make the call based our judgement of the facts and interpretation of the rule without personal regard to the parties involved. In other words, it's player A and player B, not Erstad againt my team's catcher.
There is no point to discussing this play in a forum and debating a judgement call if you do not have the ability to look at the situation without bias.

It's clear that this discussion is becoming more about what happened to my team's catcher when it should be about the rules.

No honest, impartial umpire would make a judgement of that play and say that Erstad's only intent was to injure another player. In this play there are only two possibilities when making the judgement call to determine malicious contact.

1) Did the baserunner legally make contact with the catcher with the sole intent of injuring the catcher without regard to scoring the run?
OR

2) Did the baserunner make contact with the catcher to dislodge the ball to avoid being tagged out and thus scoring a run?

It's that simple. You decide which one honestly fits this situation.

Nobody even suggested that this is malicious contact in MLB. It is in any level that has a malicious contact rule. MLB has no such rule. Where's the disagreement?