Originally Posted by BretMan
I don't do much slow pitch, maybe a couple of dozen games in the past ten years. Nothing against the slow pitch game- I've played it since 1980 and love the sport. But the bulk of my umpiring has been baseball and fastpitch.
Yesterday, I had a chance to work a couple of games and had a great time. A local receational league (huge program, with 1500 kids playing ball in the summer and 900 in their fall ball programs) is celebrating their 60th year and held a "party at the park" to kick off the 2011 season. Besides the food, team picture day, raffles and pitching clinics going on, they had three slow pitch softball games.
The first game was the league's coaches versus the league's umpires. I pitched in that one! The next two I umpired. One was the league staff against the city parks and rec department and the finale pitted two of the city's television station crews in a charity game for a local food pantry. There was a big crowd on hand and, of course, camera crews from both TV stations for the final game. And I made it on the news last night!
The novelty of having televised highlights from one of my games aside, here were a few observations from "making the switch" to slow pitch.
- Old habits die hard. Two or three times on batted balls, I busted out from behind the catcher and reached up to remove my mask! Actually hooked by left thumb up under my chin to grab the mask that wasn't there, causing my brain to skip a beat because something was "wrong". Very weird sensation.
- Another old habit...I usually re-set my indicator without looking at it. I kept re-setting it to an 0-0 count, instead of 1-1.
- The extra five feet on the basepaths made more of a difference for me than I would have thought. When covering plays at third, or trailing a batter-runner to first, it seemed strange to not be closer to the base. I needed to add two or three extra steps to get into the positions I'm familiar with.
- I had no real feel to gauge the ten-foot ceiling for pitches. Pretty sure some were higher than that, but nobody was complaining.
- When you watch the pitch all the way to the catcher's mitt before calling it, by the time it bounces and gets to the catcher you sure do have a lot more time to think about it than you do in fastpitch! There's a little extra "pause" in your "pause, read and react". Despite the rarity of doing a slow pitch game and tracking the ball at a downward angle, this little bit of extra time seemed to really help me on calling pitches. In the two games I worked, there were only a couple where I second-guessed myself and thought that they might have gone the other way.
- Really only had one play that generated even a whiff on controversy. Batter popped up 20-30 feet high and about ten feet in front of the plate. Catcher came out, it bounced in front of him, had wicked backspin and was shooting straight back toward the plate. In fair territory, the catcher swiped at the ball with his bare hand, then it shot back to the screen. I judged that he did in fact contact the ball over fair ground and pointed fair. B/R made it to first. Got a few cries that it was a foul ball. I said toward the defensive dugout that "the catcher touched the ball in fair ground" and nobody said anything else. Most telling...the catcher was the team manager and when I said he touched the ball, he just walked back behind the plate without saying a word.
As luck would have it, that particular play was one that made the clips on the news last night. Having it on my DVR, I was able to slow down, reverse and stop it to watch this play frame-by-frame. You could see that the catcher did just barely nick the ball with his bare hand. Upon further review...the play stands!
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