[lawump]

Ozzy, if I understand your hypothesis, you are saying that too many amateur umpires need crew conferences during games because they are not using proper mechanics. If I understand your posts, you are saying that amateur umpires often don't use proper mechanics because of their belief that another umpire on the crew will "bail them out" of a knotty situation in a conference meeting. In otherwords, (if I understand you correctly) it is your belief that too many umpires are using crew huddles as a crutch in lieu of using proper mechanics to get the call right the first time. You state that we (senior amateur umpires) need to do a better job teaching newbies proper mechanics so that they get calls right the first time and thus eliminate the need for conferences. (Please correct me if I have incorrectly stated your hypothesis).

While I agree with this hypothesis to a certain degree, I also disagree to a point. I do not think that use of "proper mechanics" alone will cut down significantly on the number of umpire conferences occuring on the amateur level. I also think that there are a number of umpires who, simply put, officiate either scared or nervous. (To use Gorilla Monsoon language, "they lack intestinal fortitude.") These umpires are scared and, as a result, are too easily intimidated by coaches to call for a crew conference. Thus, they end up in conferences all the time. On the major league level (note I did not say "professional" level) you do not have this issue. Simply put, MLB crew conferences do not arise because of an umpire being scared and/or intimidated by a manager. They usually arise, as you showed in the link in the original post, as a result of a mechanic breakdown and an umpire on the crew believing that a call was missed as a result of that breakdown.

I have found as an evaluator in my umpire association (which has over 100 members) that the majority (but not all) crew conferences are not a result of poor mechanics but are the result of the calling umpire lacking confidence in himself (and his call) and being too easily persuaded by the complaining head coach to have a conference.

The simple solution to this problem would be to tell these umpires that they may need to find another hobby/profession. But, if we did that, we would not have enough umpires to umpire the games that are played in our area. Unfortunately, we are like the vast majority of the country in that we have an umpire shortage. Thus, we need all the "warm bodies" we can get. We train them very, very hard to install proper mechanics. But, will we can (and do) have a roster of umpires with very good mechanics, training an umpire to have "intestinal fortitude" is much harder. We can only work hard to install this confidence in these umpires so that they will improve in this area.