Quote:
Originally Posted by chymechowder
gotcha. out of curiosity, then: in ASA with a man on first and a fly ball to left, the base umpire is supposed to have the catch and the tag?
that seems extremely odd to me. why wouldn't home plate take the tag here? I mean, there's only two things happening--why have one guy do both?  |
In your situation, in ASA, the BU can not have both calls. Either the BU goes out to call the catch and the PU has the tag-up, or the PU has the catch and the BU has the tag-up. Once the BU goes out to call the catch, he's done for the rest of the play - once you go out, you stay out.
There are always going to be problems inherent to the 2-umpire system when it comes to tag-up coverage. If tourneys or leagues don't want to pay for a 3-umpire crew (and who could blame them, since it increases the cost by 50%), then they just have to accept that we will do the best we can.
I think ASA keeps it pretty simple with the tag-up responsibilities in a 2-umpire system, demonstrated by the fact that it took only a few sentences to describe who has which runner. If we start getting into left field versus right field versus center field, that would add a layer of complexity that no organization with 40,000+ umpires is ready to deal with.
Personally, I've not had that big a problem with it in 17 years.