Quote:
Originally Posted by MrUmpire
You don't seem to be able to look at this from an umpiring viewpoint, so lets try something more familiar to you.
What if someone, with a great passion for psychology, your field of study, but no training, hung up a shingle and began giving advice to people who believed him because of that passion?
The clown in those videos, if you read the posts at that site, is actually influencing people. His so-called passion and his nerve to post those ridiculous videos makes him, in the eyes of some neophytes, credible. This is another, more modern way, to perpetuate myths and make the lives of umpires who work to really improve their craft, miserable.
Passion, my young friend, must be tempered with some amount of reasonableness or knowledge in order to positively benefit someone.
The only positive attribute of those videos is their comedic value.
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Maybe I just don't feel the same way some people do about his videos. To me they were good for a laugh, but in a fun way. I don't think the videos will make umpires look bad as a group, and I don't think umpires with basic training will imitate what they see in the videos.
I think comparing psychology to umpiring is like comparing apples to oranges. The result of someone taking the umpire seriously is that they might develop some bad habits. The results of someone taking the amateur psychologist seriously could be much more costly. Baseball is just a game afterall. I really don't think the posted videos will cause any harm. The people responding are probably being sarcastic.
People complain about flowerchild's insults in the same thread that they diss the guy in the video. It doesn't work both ways.