I’m strictly a slow pitch softball umpire. However I am on the UIC staff for my state and always catch myself evaluating umpires whether I’m on duty or just a spectator. My son plays J.V. baseball for his high school and last evening I attended one of his games, and as mentioned I caught myself mentally evaluating the umpires and here is what I had.
Note: I’m admittedly untrained in baseball so I can only give a fans perspective.
Base Umpire:
• Runner on 1b only. Stood w/in 6 inches of the mound and about a foot behind the pitcher. Definitely in the pitchers field of vision.
• Runners on 2b. Positioned himself to where he had to duck on a pick-off attempt at 2b. IMO interfering with the throw.
From a fans perspective (the one sitting 10 feet from me in the stands) “His horrible positioning caused him to miss numerous calls”. From my perspective he really only missed one, a pulled foot that he couldn’t see.
Plate Umpire
•Very obviously new and nervous.
•Used left hand slot for every batter. Surprisingly he didn’t take any off the face mask, however his strike zone was surprising wide on righties (
) and tight on lefties.
•Had a hand motion for every call, pointing to where balls missed. His signal for a pitch that missed high and outside looked identical to his strike.
•Missed the help on the above mentioned pulled foot. He was already turning to brush the plate when the call was made.
It was obvious that these guys were new and trying to learn but are need in some instruction (and confidence.)
So here’s the question. Is it my duty as a fellow umpire to try to find these guys UIC/Assignor and provide some feedback or do I just leave well enough alone?