[KentuckyBlue]

If you no longer get that heartswollen, anything's-possible-this-year-maybe-even-for-the-Cubs-and-Bosox feeling when you first step on the green fields in spring, then you've gotten too jaded to enjoy the game properly and should hang it up and just watch NASCAR the rest of your life.

If you're a blue and you don't confidently, even almost arrogantly, take the field for the first game of the year with the thought that you ought to have W.G.U. on your cap (because that's what you are), then you are on the downhill side of your calling career. Oh sure, within an inning or two you're going to have maybe fluffed a call, or at least not handled one like you know you ought to have, and you'll be just another dusty struggling umpire again; but for that little shining moment, game 1 inning 1, you're ten feet tall and bulletproof and at the helm of the greatest game in the world.

Love this game enough to study the rules in advance, dress right, and get there early. Do the little humbling groundskeeping things make things a little bit safer for the players. Knuckledraggers though you might think some of them are, the players are decent citizens inside (even if maybe WAY deep down inside) and they'll notice what you do and give you credit in their hearts (though they'd probably rather die than say it out loud). Their work lives teach them to respect sincere effort. Offer it, they'll recognize it. Your entire season of servitude might earn you the benefit of the doubt on one (1) close call, too. Ample reward.

I really enjoy working for the drunken churchmen; the Pete Rose wannabes; the arrogant former minor league baseball players now tearing up class D despite a bum right knee; the silly co-ed in terribly inappropriate shoes (and maybe even a skirt) drafted from the stands to be the team's fourth woman; the pastor playing on his church's team and slowly losing his religion; the 300-pound player-manager whose team of equally heavy hitters has never had a season higher than third but who strategizes and agonizes over every game as if it were the Series finale; the coasting class B squad in their hideous yellow-jacket pants who eat up class D opposition all season until by August they've forgotten how to win against their equals; and, God help me, even that breed I find easiest to criticize -- the tournament-addicted softball weekend workaholic who has all the equipment and none of the fun, working too hard at playing to enjoy the game, with his high-school heart in his 36-year-old body, caressing that $400 bat more tenderly than he ever has his tuned-out wife, who is sitting with the other widows in the lawn chairs on the shady side, the game as far away as Mars for her as she watches their children grow up playing in parking lot gravel.

My 11th year. I'm such a rookie; I have so much to learn. Bring it on!