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I had a similar situation to this - except it was a 15 year old game. The league has two fields, on opposite sides of town. It was playoffs - 4 teams left. The league decided to switch their games around last second, not tell their assignor, and hence we had a field with 2 umpires and a field with no umpires, about 20 mins apart. Via cell phones, the coaches at our field begged one of us to go. He was literally opening up his own wallet, which didn't go over well with me in front of about 100 spectators.
My parnter and I talked, and we figured out that a) neither of us were obligated to go b) didn't want to leave each other stranded (always have 2 umpires around here) and c) both had places to be at night (other game would have started an hour late). We then discussed what we would tell the coaches, he suggested saying that he didn't have his plate gear (which I thought may cause a bit of a stirup), so instead we were truthful with them except for reason c. Of course, the coaches accused us of reason c.
It got so bad that we came back together, and sought out a solution. I went to my car, got my phone, and gave them the assignor's number. We started up our game and the assignor told the coaches, basically, to shove it, it was the leagues fault for not notifying him and he also defended us really strongly for our decision to stay on our field (from what he told me later that night).
Thoughts?
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