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Originally Posted by BretMan
On pitches called balls, he would extend his left arm out and downward, with an open palm facing toward the pitcher.
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This meant "the pitch was offered to the batter outside the zone", no kidding. The open plam was as if to say "I know you tried but I must call it a Ball."
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On checked swings, instead of pointing and saying, "Yes, he went", he would raise his right hand, index finger extended, and make a little twirling motion, kind of like what you might use to signal a home run, to indicate that the batter had indeed "went around".
The "ball" thing I didn't care for, but the "twirly" thing looked kind of cool!
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You rarely pointed at a player, you would indicate what he had done in a kinda mime sorta way
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I have a vague memory of umpires doing this when I was kid, but that was well before my time of actually calling games. Were these at one time considered to be "standard" umpire signals?
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I worked an inner city park, bunch of tuffs, drunk, FP and SP softball; you never said "out" or the number of strikes. Safe was a big deal but you had to be careful if you made a big deal of Safe, you would take a load of crap and then have to apologize for showing up the D.
