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Originally Posted by LilLeaguer
While this has been discussed before, I'll jump in.
Little League is fundamentally organized as a service organization that provides baseball and softball leagues for youth. As such, most folks that contribute are expected to be volunteers, and the bulk of the volunteers are probably parents of the children involved.
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Little League is a charitable organization that, thanks largely to its television contract with ESPN and its charter fees from local leagues, took in $2 million more in revenue than it expended last year (for non-charitable organizations, that would be known as a "profit"). In my opinion, the organization is overzealous and wrongheaded in its insistence that its umpires work for free. They make no such demands on their executive and administrative staff in Williamsport, on their regional directors and staff in each of the eight US regions, or on local league service vendors such as insurance agents, equipment suppliers, or the like.
Little League has, in the US, been losing market share to competing leagues for a number of years now. Certainly there are any number of reasons for that, but one seems pretty clearly to be the general feeling amongst kids and their parents that the typical LL is pretty far removed from "real baseball." Perhaps that image could be improved if more leagues experimented with using "real umpires."