Quote:
Originally Posted by MrRabbit
And heaven forbid that someone tries to explain it to them.
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Well, I've tried. That's been met with varying degrees of success...
Some of these leagues might do something as informal as hand an umpire a list of their rules and say, "Tell us what you think". Whether or not they actually change anything is kind of a coin toss.
Some just take the stance that "these are our rules and this is how we're going to do it"...end of story.
One large league near me really seems to give a darn about stuff like this. They email the league rules to their umpires before the season for critique and annually hold a couple of meetings with senior umpires to go over rule issues. Their board member in charge of supervising the umpires has a coaching background, but the guy is so serious about his duties that he went through the process of becoming FED certified just to have a better understanding of the rules and umpire mechanics. He holds several rules meetings for coaches and puts together a pretty good umpire training program for the new guys that work lower level games.
In that league, I have managed to get some of their local rules clarified or changed. But there can still be some "politics" involved. Any rule change has to go through their board of directors. There have been a couple where a board member had his own idea of what the rule should be and dug in his heels to resist any changes.