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Originally Posted by NY Softball
This was my first post on here and I am kind of surprised by some of the responses. Although I don't want spend an entire evening umpiring a high school softball game, my objective is not to see how quick I can get to the parking lot or how fast I can make the game go. Yah, keep the game moving along but also I umpire to be fair to the teams playing and display a work ethic to high school kids. If a team is taking their merry ole' time in warm-ups I will reduce the # of warm-up pitches. But to just speed up the game so I can get home 10 minutes earlier is not my philosphy of officiating.
In my OP I was looking for some advice on how to best to manage this situation and not let it turn into chaos. As I said in one of my other replies I did charge the defense with a conference. Luckily there were no runners on, but if there were, it may have been unfair to the offense to remind the defense there were only two outs. One reply was right in saying that the teams should know this. I often tell the cathcer when there is two outs and I believe I did in this situation as well.
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I will still say nothing. You may not be aware of it, but there are teams which use this as a defensive strategy and I'm certainly not going to interfere with their game. If the defense runs off the field and the offense does the same, shame on the offense. The defense is risking exactly what happened above in Andy's game, intentional or not. Cannot be anymore fair than that.
If asked, I'll readily provide the number of outs, but I'm not acting as a traffic cop for teams. It's not the umpire's job to direct the players during play other than the batter to the box and the pitcher to pitch.