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It surprises me that I seem to be the only one, so far, who is willing to try to see what Pete is saying without rushing to the insult bucket. (BTW, "ties for the second dumbest post ever" is getting REALLY, REALLY trite.)
Pete is saying anyone can be an umpire, if they're willing to be a bad umpire. That's not too far from one of my standard sayings, which is "the only way to become a good umpire is to first be a bad one."
He goes on to point out, with validity, that the non-umpiring world is really, demonstrably, pretty tolerant of substandard umpiring. It wasn't substandard umpiring that resolved the MLB strike in the 90's, and it damn sure wasn't substandard umpiring that resolved the MiLB strike earlier this year. In this year's strike, it was pretty obviously the failure of the substandard replacement umpires to have any kind of noticeable impact on anybody except other umpires, that caused the MiLB umpires to settle and come back to work.
So what I took from what Pete was saying was simply that umpires are kind of like Rodney Daingerfield (RIP) in that we don't get no respect, in particular from the rest of the non-umpire baseball world. That ain't right, but that's the way it is.
I don't think he was claiming that there's no difference between a veteran, trained, diligent and dedicated umpire, and a dad out of the stands. I think he was claiming that, within reason, the dad out of the stands can walk on the field, wing it, and 99 out of 100 of the players, coaches, and spectators probably won't notice how bad he sucks, compared to a "real" umpire.
I don't know why those rather simple observations elicited such a visceral reaction from everybody.
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