[jkumpire]

[/rant]

I am usually a patient guy on the field, though I did lose my temper once this year. But today I had a game of total irritation, like sitting on a Brillo pad for eight hours. I would like to find out what your biggest irritant is/was.

A local radio station decided to do a college game I did today, the play-by-play guy had never done a game before at the park. I had the plate. The press box for the field is close to the backstop, under the stands in this really nice park.

Well, the ying yang announcer was so loud that everyone on the field heard him, including my partner, even when he went to B and C. And every pitch he thought was a ball, or every time he thought a player or dugout did not like the call he would say it. Of course, he had no conception of a strike, even if it bit him in the nose.

One pitch was a fastball on the outer third of the plate, thigh high. The fastball broke the pocket of F2's glove, so the ball goes to the ground. "The umpire called it a strike!" He said. His partner replied, "well he dropped the ball, so it should have been a ball." Of course, it took him five minutes to figure out why F2 decided to go to the dugout and get a new glove.

We had to hear this crap for a full game. The best of them all was the time my partner had a wacker at 1B. The announcer said:

"He got him at first, and I think the umpire got that call right!!!!"

Glad to know it.

What's worse, he called me by the wrong name all day long.

I had a great game, great zone, dead on all day, and I heard all day long the baseball equivalent of an auto mechanic commenting on a human heart transplant surgeon's work.

[/rant]

Well, what is yours?