[mcrowder]

Tim - I agree with you.

The statement saying that we are taught in every clinic around that we should not verbalize "Batter's Out" is most definitely true.

I also agree that umpiring is slow to change, and in most cases I feel this puts our profession at a disadvantage... but that's another argument.

It is also true that should an umpire be caught uttering "Batter's Out" by any umpire of any decent degree of experience, he will either be gently reminded that he should not do so, or ridiculed and joked about by this experienced and otherwise intelligent umpire with his cronies.

No offense intended to Tim here, or to any of the other highly experienced guys on this board. 99.9% of the time, I highly respect your opinion(s), at least when we can keep it all away from the name-calling we've seen too much of recently.

For some reason, if an umpire like myself - one that works VERY hard to have a full understanding of the rules, one that makes his best effort in improving his handling of coaches, one that invests large amounts of time helping OTHER umpires learn and grow, and recruiting new ones to the profession, and one that busts his butt even on his worst day to get in as good a position as possible on even the most routine of plays - an umpire like me is immediately dismissed by the good-ole-boy network as "bush" because of a refusal to follow a mechanic that makes absolutely no sense??!?!

Here's the crux of the question then... and the point of my ire: WHY? Why is it such an awful faux pas to actually announce that this particular player is out, solely because he is the batter. We surely announce (and loudly, when clarity is necessary) when players are out at any other point in the game. Isn't it an important function of our job, in general, to aid in the flow of the game by actually informing the participants what our decisions are, especially when it's not necessarily obvious? Why do we follow that tenet in every phase of the game except this one?

This is not a case of me jumping on the bandwagon after the escapade in the ALCS. We've had this discussion before, albeit usually not as vehemently on my part. I have acknowledged that the "taught" method is to leave the players in the dark in this case and let the confusion reign. "If the players can shave, the players should know the situation". And in front of these supposed "higher-ups", I use the proscribed poor mechanic.

But now that, even if for only one brief moment in time, it has been shown that even the most frequent of shavers could possibly not know the situation in this particular case 100% of the time. And just possibly, the one time that he doesn't occurs at crunch time in a crucial game... and in front of a national audience.

It's actually a shame that it had to come to this public a gaff to push this issue to the forefront... but now that it's there, I feel compelled to shout from the rooftops. So pardon my over-vehemence on this. It's needed to be fixed for a long long time, and the refusal to call the game in just this one little instance has ALWAYS struck me as asinine.

It's an out. Call it an out.