[BretMan]

Having just recently made some NSA contacts and becoming NSA registered, I got a phone call looking for an umpire for one of their tournaments. It was slow pitch and I have done maybe two dozen slow pitch games in my life.

In that handful of games, I have witnessed more meltdowns, hissy fits, bizare arguments and out-of-control behavior that I think that I have seen in all of my hundreds of fastpitch and baseball games combined.

This was a unique tourney. It was sponsored by the local police and fire departments and had teams composed of police officers, firefighters and EMT's from all over the state. And it was held on a Monday to accomodate the second and third shift work requirements of the participants. We had a nice, hot 95 degree day and I called five games, with a break between the third and fourth.

A few observations:

- I wasn't sure if having the participants be police officers and firefighters would lead to more problems (testosterone-fueled macho theatrics) or fewer (disiplined behavior and respect for authority). The latter proved to be true and- a few expected grumbles or gripes aside- things went smoothly.

- Apparently, NSA mechanics have a few quirks compared to ASA. The "A" position is still used with no runners on base- "B" is for everything else.

- The players seemed perplexed by my lack of verbally calling pitches "deep", "low", "outside" or "hit the plate". (And, no, there were no "double-fist pumps" from me that day, though I did observe a few from other umpires.) My call on pitches was simply "ball" or "strike". That really seemed to confuse 'em! These slow pitch players are so conditioned to the running "commentary" from many slow pitch umpires that they have come to expect it as the norm.

- After the games, I was talking with one of the pitchers who seemed particularly distracted by me not announcing the location of his pitches. It seems that somewhere along the line that day, a batter had hit him with a batted ball. The batter continued on to base, but did not bother to verbally tell the pitcher that "he was sorry" (for hitting him).

The pitcher went into a lengthy explanation of some murky "unwritten rule" whereby the batter not saying, "I'm sorry", had violated some super-secret softball code and that meant that he was trying to hit the pitcher on purpose and that meant his team was going to retaliate...and he was really, really serious about all this stuff.

This whole soap opera subplot was playing out under the surface of one of my games and I was completely oblivious to it (and glad of that!).