[runem]

Professional baseball is to amateur baseball as roller skates are to an f-16, They both could be called similar insomuch as they are both forms of transportation; common sense highlights the extreme differences, not the similarities. It would be stupid to place my seven year old in the cockpit based on his winning a race at the school roller rink party. Verbal judo is garbage you only hear those amateur umpires, who subscribe to the "we work for them" thinking, talk about. Professional baseball is a COMPLETELY different game altogether. Pleasing "coaches" and ad's is survival in high school and college baseball. Attempting to appease professional MANAGERS not only will not work, it will cause you, your crew, and all other umpires in the league, even bigger and more frequent ****storms. In professional baseball, the objective is not always, and never singularly, to avoid an ejection. Sometimes your job is, simply, to facilitate the argument and subsequent ejection. (this IS NOT what happened in this particular case by the way- DJ handled it near-perfectly) Those of you who think you have a better answer fail to understand the question altogether. This doesn't make you a better or worse umpire than those in professional baseball, it simply makes you an apple running your mouth about life in the orange grove.