Quote:
Originally posted by mcrowder
Good god, Peter. What do you work, a prison league?
Except in the MOST EXTREME of circumstances, any effort by the umpire to "control" a group of out of control fans is only going to exacerbate the situation. You are paid to UMPIRE THE GAME ... not play etiquette police to the fans.
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Fairly close to prison, Washington DC. We are full of criminals here, the difference is that most of them walk the street. The high powered lawyers keep them out of jail.
Your failure to recognize that you can and should control what goes on in the stands in youth baseball, is a failure of your imagination as a human being and umpire. The fact that the actions that you have seen "exacerbate the situation" means that they were not done correctly and were attempted by immature or incompentent umpires.
Joseph Satlin never worried about exacerbating the situation. He concerned himself with control. He kept killing people until he got control. Likewise, I can keep "executing" the morons until no one is left. Then I have control.
Yes, it is difficult to get control of a baseball game in the seventh inning after a game of marginal behavior. The morons have six innings of history with the umpire crew that leads them to believe that they are dealing with wimps. I execute them in the first inning by using the game administration personnel to do the dirty work. If I do my job right, they never know that the umpire initiated the execution.
Joseph Stalin caused 20 million or more of his countrymen to die. (This was over and above the 25 million or so that the Nazis killed.) Yet there is no record of Joseph Stalin ever pulling a single trigger. For the most part, he never knew who his victims were. His underlings knew what he expected and carried out most executions without him having to say a single word. Achieve that status on the baseball field and you will never be confronted in the parking lot after the game. The cretins will be mad at game administration personnel, not you.
Peter