[jkumpire]

Garth,

No offense intended if you work lots of baseball, but you need to understand something.

In higher levels of Baseball there is a concept called "own your own call", or "take care of your business". Players and coaches expect the umpire to make get the call right, and lots of people know who should be calling what.

In your case, you are saying you're not sure he got the bag. You did the right thing, you called him safe. F3 gave the play away and the manager was telling him that. I recently was in a ball park for a college game, with a 2 out play at the plate. Ball beats the runner to the plate, F2 made a terrible tag, but in the PU's view tagged him, and the PU rang up the runner. Right call was made.

After the play F2 went and tagged the runner again, after the runner touched the plate, and after PU made his call. HC and F2 had a long talk in between innings since he threw the PU under the bus for the second tag, when the umpire clearly called him out, and he was out.

In your case, your job is to make the call at 1B. You need to own this call. If you go to your partner, or if your partner comes out and overrules you (which is exactly how it will be interpreted by everyone in the park) then on every close play for the rest of the game you are going to get nothing but hassled, and if there is an argument, you will be asked to "appeal it to your partner, he had a better angle than you, etc". On every close play for the rest of that game you have made the PU your assistant base umpire.

Further, when you called safe did you use the basic signal mechanic saying, "He's safe, he's off the bag", and moving both your arms to one side in a waving motion, or did you just signal safe, as in he beat the ball to the base?
Using the mechanic to say that he missed the bag in your judgment explains to both dugouts what you saw, and you would not have heard a word from the defensive team's HC on the play. It sounds to me like like you had a big hesitation before you called safe in the first place, also leading me to think that F3 thought you made no call, so he was trying buy an out call from you.

Now, everyone of us on the board who has participated in this discussion has a desire to get every call right, nobody wants to miss any call ever, especially a call like this at 1B. If the PU is doing his job he has other things to worry about than checking for a foot touching the bag on this play. A good PU would have said to you, "in my judgment he did," (or words to that effect) as opposed to what he told you, because if he's doing his job, he won't have a perfect angle to see the play either. If he does have such an angle he's not doing his job.

What we are trying to tell you is:

1. That the call is yours to make.
2. You made it. That's what should happen on the play.
3. Trying to "get the call right" as you describe it with conferences and asking for help causes many more problems than it solves. and in this case all you have is the PU's guess substituting for your guess, not a good thing to have happen.
4. If you missed it, then find out why you missed it after the game and don't do it again.

And for my .02:

5. Never let a team's HC get into your head like this one did. If you are asking about a call 2 or 3 innings later either you know you missed it, or the HC who said that has gotten you thinking about you missing a call, almost guaranteeing that your mind is on the previous call, instead of getting the next call right, almost a guarantee you will miss another close call in the game.

In your judgment you got the call right. good call. If after the game you think you missed it, forget about it. the losing team did not lose the game because you might have missed the call.