[BretMan]

Tournament scheduling should be interesting this year. Back about three years ago, we had an assigner who was adamant that umpires should not work more than two consecutive games and no more than three or four in a day. His reasoning was the same as what's been expressed here (mental and physical fatigue, the quality of umpiring in later games, etc.).

Some guys bitched that they weren't getting enough games under his system of scheduling. But I think it worked well from the standpoint of the teams having fresher officials, which directly affects the games, plus a larger pool of umpires were getting experience, which in the long run would affect the quality of the umpiring as a whole.

Then we got a new assigner. Pretty much everything became "three umpires to a field, all day long, plate/base/off rotation".

The second assigner was an experiened umpire and he had to realize the pitfalls of working too many games in a day, especially in severe summer weather. My impression was that he went with this system simply because it was easier for him to make the schedule.

Why bother contacting, scheduling and confirming with, say, six umpires, when you can cover the same number of games and only have to deal with three umpires?

That assigner had enough after one year and yet another took over. I think that our group was getting desperate for someone to do this, as the person who took over seemed ill-equipped to handle the load. The new assigner continued the "three men to a field" type of scheduling. There was also a lot of miscommunication about assignments. Numerous times I received the wrong game times or field number. One week I even had an UIC call me to ask why I wasn't at my assigned field, when I had never been contacted about working the tournament!

That assigner had enough after one year and gave it up. Now, this year, the original assigner is taking it over again. I'm wondering how all the guys that loved working tons of games in one day are going to react if he goes back to his old way of doing things?