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Okay....since there have been way too many posts to quote properly, lets review - first about the OY ball:
As somebody (Im not looking back and trying to find it!)said, if making the OY mandatory the next couple years makes things a little simpler for both the manufacturer AND user, whats the big deal???? OYIS SAFER...plus as I put it, if you are playing on an unlighted field, you might actually get to play a little bit longer as you get towards twilight. The people complaining about this are sounding like the TENNIS people, for cripe's sake, when that sport went from white to yellow! I find personally the OY is much more visible after several innings of usage - it simply stands out through the dirt better....
Now for the pants -
At the end of the 06 season, our local group decided to go to grey for the following reasons:
Yes, a lot of our people do college ball...and a lot do HS baseball, too...so if one is traveling from either to do an ASA game, heres no change of pants involved.
We do a lot of PONY tournaments locally, and PONY told us that we HAD to wear grey for those tournaments - so a lot of our people were going to have to buy grey anyways
The only fly in this ointment is that NYS hs softball still mandates the navy slacks - but then again , NYS only changes that sort of things when it absolutely HAS to -partially because many of the umpires who live in the North Country simply do not work a lot of games due to the weather. NY only abandoned the Elbecos when it became obvious that the Elbecos were simply not going to be available anymore.
As has been said before, NOTHING looks as crappy as the navy blue pants after working around HP in the dust for a few innings. And nothing is as HOT as those navy blues on a hot day, either. If you think the players care a flying cr*p about you having sweat stains, you are worrying about the wrong thing - besides, change pants in between games!
And in a similar vein, when we started going out there in the powder blue/grey combination...NOBODY CARED!! And we actually got a few compliments along the way....Before this year, a few of our 'elite' umps had got the grey and the dark navy tops, and starting to wear them to some night games -its a VERY sharp looking combination, and more of have started to do it. It does look very nice under the lights.... The dark navy top seems to be a slightly different mesh than the powder, and is not hot at ALL!
Again, the dark navy PANTS are definitely hotter than the heather grey - which is why I think the heather grey will win out in the end....
I think SOME of you would be very happy to go back to the heavy dark blue shirts and pants they wore back in the fifities....
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