[BretMan]

Yuengling just became available in my area about a month ago. For all the hoopla surrounding it's introduction you'd think it was the second coming of Christ!

This season was pretty much business as usual. I worked indoor fastpitch in the winter (that just started again last week and runs through February), high school baseball and softball in the spring, ASA tournaments all summer and fall and rec league baseball and softball in the summer and fall. I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 total games, which is about what I've averaged for the past 6-7 years. This ran the gamut from 10U to men's fastpitch and everything in between.

I branched out a little bit and called games for a couple of new rec leagues where I hadn't worked before, did some tournaments that were a little further away (several about 60 miles from home) and even worked two NSA tournaments (on weekends where ASA didn't have anything going on).

Oh, yeah...I also worked TWO slow pitch games this year! One was a charity game between two local television stations and I got to see video of myself on the local newscast.

A handful of strange plays stick out in my mind, but I've probably already posted about those on this forum!

Two odd things about this season were the spring weather and dealing with a new ASA assigner.

I usually get in about 30 high school games (both baseball and softball) every spring. This year, due to work committments (HS games start at 5:00 and a new job I was working didn't always allow me to be there by then ) I had to cut back during the week, while picking up more double headers on the weekend. Of the 22 HS games I had scheduled, 12 were rained out! This was probably the wettest springs I can remember and I've never lost over half of my games before.

On the ASA scheduling, we had a new assigner this year. After working my butt off the past few years to "move up the ranks", our new assigner was a guy who really had never met me. He's been around forever, but we had never really had any interaction. The first month or so of the tournament season, he gave me few assignments and the ones he did give me were lower-level games. Our previous assigner had evaluated me and gave me a steady diet of upper-level games and quite a few championship games on Sundays.

I was getting kind of frustrated. It wasn't that I felt I deserved anything more than other qualified umpires in our group, but did feel that I was being passed over for many newer and less-qualified umpires (we have about 125 umpires in our association).

Not wanting to be seen as "a troublemaker" or "complainer", I cautiously approached our new assigner about this. He was honest with me and told me that he had never seen me work, and that he was giving more assignments to umpires who had had worked with or known for a long time. Instead of "demanding" more games, I expressed my desire to work more games and more challenging games. I also invited him to come out and watch me work so that I could be evaluated on my performance.

This approach must have worked. After being evaluated, he gave me as many games as I could handle and scheduled me to work several championship games.